Busi bling
Holy hottie!
Congress of the People organisers spent their week last week on the N2 diplomatically adorning lampposts on the information highway with equal numbers of posters showing Mvume Dandala and Mosiuoa Lekota. The good reverend not only beat Lekota to the leadership, he’s also ahead in the beauty race.
Whipping up support
In an effort to prove they’re not just a party for the bling-n’-buy crowd, Cope has taken up headquarters in Port Elizabeth on the seedy side of town next door to Adult World, the sex shop. Whips? Leather wear? Clergymen? Sounds like a winning campaign combo, and they say charity always starts on your own door-to-door step.
Flock off
Shame. The African Christian Democratic Party took Rhema Church pastor Ray McCauley at his word and asked if they could also come and speak to his flock, like Jacob Zuma. Ray said “no”, causing ACDP leader the Rev Kenneth Meshoe to cry foul. If you ask Busi there are just too many clergymen setting the political agenda these days: makes JZ seem like a breath of fresh sermon.
Pass the Tippex
At a breakfast meeting in Auckland Park this week ANC top gun Jacob Zuma had to remind the audience that he had also been the country’s deputy president and so is no snotneus when it comes to leadership. He felt he had to point this out because the ANC’s HR department forgot to include this achievement on his CV. Perhaps Luthuli House felt that, as this was when the graft charges against Zuma first surfaced, it was a job description best forgotten.
Sticky ticket
Everyone’s scrambling to show how much they love Msholozi on the ANC’s election road to riches. The big fashion trend is to plaster your car with ANC stickers—not discreet bumper strips but massive posters of JZ stuck on all your doors—like the ones used by real estate agents. There is a condition though: your car must be a swanky new German sedan or maybe a nice big 4x4, to show how well the ANC treats comrades—A Better Tender for All?
Sleep after reading
The IFP has been throwing Monday morning skinner sessions with the media in eThekwini. According to the hungover hacks who attend these press conferences hosted by the party’s candidate for provincial premier, Zanele Magwaza-Msibi, they’ve been about as revealing as a bhurkini on North Beach. Busi hears Sista Zanele recycles old newspaper clippings of stories as familiar to the scribes as their own handwriting. Which it usually is.
But with the Agriculture Department and Ithala Bank (headed politically by ANC premier candidate and finance MEC Zweli Mkhize) always making headlines with corruption allegations, the soporific nature of these get-togethers didn’t deter one of Mkhize’s media people from sneaking in last Monday. She was soon picking her nails with boredom at the IFP’s threatened outline of “the extent of corruption in the ANC-led KZN provincial government along with the IFP plans to tackle it after the 2009 election”. What Busi wants to know is this: while the IFP appeared to not know much more than the grizzled members of the fourth estate, the question remains: What did the ANC think they knew?
