Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa. (Photo: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images)
Thursday.
It’s hard not to be impressed — and a little overawed, actually — at the speed with which South Africa’s referral of the Netanyahu regime to the International Court of Justice has been processed.
Less than seven days after the initial application instituting proceedings against Israel was filed on 29 December, papers have been exchanged and hearing dates have already been set for oral argument by both parties, on Thursday and Friday next week.
They clearly don’t celebrate the new year like we do in Mzansi over there in The Hague, where the wheels of justice continued to turn, despite the happy season being in full cry.
They need to — at the time this was written, more than 22 000 people had been killed in Gaza since 9 October. By the time it appears, how many more will have been killed?
We’re still a million miles away from seeing Bibi jailed for crimes against humanity — or even the permanent ceasefire South Africa wants the court to order as part of a package of provisional measures aimed at ending the genocide in Gaza.
But the process of holding Benjamin Netanyahu and his government — and the Israel Defence Forces — to acccount for its disregard for the loss of thousands of civilian lives since the latest conflict began has to start somewhere.
It also has to start with someone.
Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration has deployed some of South Africa’s finest legal minds to argue the case prosecuting Israel over its refusal not to commit genocide against the residents of Gaza.
Israel has, in turn, accused South Africa of “blood libel” and has appointed Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer to argue on its behalf, a response that appears to sum up its case, long before it is delivered.
Cyril the Upholsterer might be leading the way when it comes to matters international, but when it comes to those of an electrical nature, team Ramaphosa is, sadly, a little less effective.
It didn’t take long for the electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa to remind us that the jolly season is over — and that we’re living in Mzansi — by reinstating load-shedding after 18 delicious days of non-stop electricity.
The smoke from the New Year’s Eve fireworks had hardly cleared over ward 33 when the electricity minister gave us the not-so-good news on behalf of Eskom that we were returning to stage two and stage three with immediate effect.
One minute, there’s wall-to-wall electricity, working streetlights and coffee every morning, the next, we’re back to charging inverters, phones and standby lamps the moment the lights come on again.
It’s not the start to the year any of us had been hoping for, but an inevitable one, given that nothing had changed — from a power-generation perspective — since before the holiday season began.
It might be a new year, but for the citizens of our fair Republic, 2024 will be another 12 months of Sputla giveth and Sputla taketh away.
Having an uninterrupted supply of power over the festive season was in itself something of a holiday — a welcome break from having to live life according to the Eskom load-shedding schedule.
All that electricity made Mzansi feel like a normal country and almost made up for being too broke to go on an actual holiday.
I don’t appear to have been alone in that. Our former president Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma didn’t get much of a break either, what with the launch of his new party uMkhonto weSizwe on 16 December and his hitting of the campaign trail immediately thereafter.
No Dezembering in Dubai for the former head of state.
uBaba spent the festive season trying to ruin Ramaphosa’s holidays — a green-shirted ghost of Christmas — and presidents — past, haunting the incumbent — and the rest of us — long after we thought he had been laid to rest, politically speaking.
The ANC has decided to blue-tick Zuma and press on regardless, leaving him and his followers to live their lives outside the party, something they should have done back in 2007.
uBaba’s announcement that he had jacked the name of the party’s disbanded military wing and was using it to campaign against the ANC, while staying in the party, might have sounded weird, but wasn’t really that much of a surprise.
Zuma has been two-timing the ANC since his days as economic development MEC in the kingdom in the 1990s, so starting a new party while remaining in the ANC is the logical conclusion of every political move he has made since then.