President Cyril Ramaphosa. Photo: Brenton Geach/Gallo Images
While draining the main vein inside a lavish Union Buildings lavatory, President Cyril Ramaphosa was shocked to see the mythical Pinky Pinky monster spewing spurious “regime change” conspiracies at the cupcake-in-chief.
Ramaphosa’s sighting of this creature happened in the minutes before the government building’s electricity switched to its generator during Eskom’s perennial power cuts.
According to renowned visual artist Penny Siopis, Pinky Pinky resembles a hideously hybrid “half-man half-woman, half-human half-animal, and half-dog half-cat, white tokoloshe” — often with one claw and one paw.
This creature is a paranormal horror that was said to attack adolescents in primary school bathrooms.
Back at the Union Buildings, the toilet was dark, with only the president’s job-support device — otherwise known as his iPad in which he stores his crib notes on how to run a country — slightly illuminating the loo.
And then it showed itself — a blood-curdling behemoth displaying dastardly and freakish features, regaling Ramaphosa that his reign as South Africa’s first citizen would be curtailed by external forces that were not partial to his presidency.
“Cupcake,” Pinky Pinky posited, a pink bone protruding from his pelvis, “I know that your genocide accusations against Israel will be the end of your timid tenure as South Africa’s president. You have made the wrong enemies.”
These eerie thoughts crossed my mind when Ramaphosa, giving the closing address of the governing ANC’s year-planning gathering in Boksburg in Gauteng last week, suggested that this year’s provincial and national elections could be affected because of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
“The fightback may also focus on our domestic politics and our electoral outcomes in order to pursue the regime change agenda,” Ramaphosa said.
The president did not provide any proof for his assertions nor indicate whether evidence existed for what he told his comrades in Boksburg.
As the Mail & Guardian reports this week, Ramaphosa’s national security adviser, Sydney Mufamadi, stopped short of saying that the regime change allegations were probably a figment of his boss’s imagination.
Ramaphosa’s presidency has been characterised by these wild thoughts, to paraphrase Barbadian superstar Rihanna, including dreaming about smart cities and bullet trains that traversed the country — again, nary a plan nor evidence of how this would be achieved.
“We want a South Africa that has prioritised its rail networks and is producing high-speed trains connecting our megacities and the remotest areas of our country,” the cupcake-in-chief contended during his February 2019 State of the Nation address.
“We should imagine a country where bullet trains pass through Johannesburg as they travel from here to Musina, and they stop in Buffalo City on their way from eThekwini back here.”
But the country does not know that Ramaphosa consults Pinky Pinky on matters critical to South Africa’s development, with the creature fuelling the president’s imagination.
Who can forget Ramaphosa, in February 2021, “welcoming” one million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines at OR Tambo International Airport when, as it later emerged, the jabs would expire two months later?
To refresh your memory, the cupcake-in-chief walked up to the cargo at the airport, briefly inspected a note attached to one of the huge boxes, and gave a nod of approval and thumbs up to the shipment we now know was filled with vials of sugar water.
“Buffalo Bill, the citizens’ patience with the pandemic is wearing thin. Give them sugar water in the meantime and call it vaccines — they won’t know the difference,” Pinky Pinky told Ramaphosa, referring to the president by the other nickname it gave him for his renowned love of horned cattle.
The fanciful advice dispensed by the stomach-churning being has been made worse by the return of the original political bogeyman, former president Jacob Zuma, whose new formation, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, wants to take away the ANC’s lunch faster than a pink pig feasting at the trough.
Realising the danger posed by the MK party to a possible second presidential term, the country should expect more outrageous pledges from Ramaphosa when he presents the governing ANC’s manifesto in KwaZulu-Natal later this month.
Who knows? Our first citizen could plan to shove R350 under every living room sofa in the country.
What I know is that the politics of pinky promises will continue to define Ramaphosa’s presidential tenure.