Robert Kirby : Loose Cannon
I adopt as the subject for my sermon this week the recent decision by the Western Cape’s leading prophet, Hernus Kriel.
Kriel has announced that as far as he’s concerned, the democratically imbued people of the Western Cape have every right to express their opinions on whether or not the death penalty should be reintroduced.
I hereby formally offer odds of 10 000:1 that, if this referendum does in fact take place, the result will be strongly in favour of reintroduction. The vast majority of the Kriel parish will not only want an art-of-the-state gallows erected in the WP as soon as possible, they’ll want it set up in public.
As a politician of impressive cunning, Kriel knows when the public mood has gone safely medieval. He knows he’s addressing a Christian and Muslim middle-class, sod- fearing, working-ethic public consciousness. He recognises a populace impatient with a national administration which, in the face of a particularly monstrous national crisis, does little but fart loudly around the moral spectrum.
Vide: the following line is from a letter recently dispatched by one Jay Naidoo, MP. This sentence has nothing to do with any current national crisis, it is merely indicative of the sort of coalface thinking which presently fuels our government. “I commend the work done in the interests of promoting a dynamic sector representing the diverse views of our society as we build firm foundations for a democratic, non- racial, non-sexist South Africa.”
The above quotation is absolutely verbatim. (I’m afraid ethics forbid me revealing which undervalued quasi-administrative mandarin was chosen as the lucky intellectual diddy- pan to receive this latest softly steaming Naidoo political doughnut. This is because, when I joined the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa last year, Kobus van Rooyen advised me that some of the letters the commission receives have to be kept confidential on the grounds that, by revealing their contents, the commission might yield the impression that some of its correspondents are totally impenetrable industrial strength zincbrains. Sorry, you’ll just have to guess where I saw Naidoo’s letter.)
Getting back to Kriel and his gallows referendum. Kriel is not only going to win this one, such is the current public mood that if he also proposed the reintroduction of the stocks, he would succeed. The thumbscrew, the rack, the whipping-post, the keelhaul and the stake are lurking around the corner. I would suggest that, given Jay Naidoo’s continuing presence in our midst, the scold’s bridle is an absolute must.
Personally, I can’t wait to go out and add my own cross to the referendum. I’ll be early in any queue which helps to get the death penalty reinstated. Count me in for the stocks and etcetera, too. Anything is better than listening to yet another sanctimonious politician prate on about his reverence for human rights, while an increasing quotient among his constituents pillage, murder and thieve and virtually never get caught, let alone punished.
Then again, Naidoo might well be showing us that turning the other cheek is still an option. There’s a fellow, not far from where I live, who recently was caught naked, in bed with his eight-month-old daughter. He had his finger up her vagina, a more compassionate method one presumes by which to rupture the hymen.
Daddy’s out on about R300 bail at the moment. No one seems to know where he’s staying, which is a good thing for him. Apparently, at the time, the police got to Daddy just ahead of some of his fellow squatters with a form of instant burn-on justice in mind.
Perhaps what this particular fellow was doing was understandable in the context of promoting the dynamic sector of his corner of the squatter camp. Perhaps, as he considered the delights of raping his eight-month-old daughter, he was just being diverse in his views.
Alas. Until somebody says we can stretch him on the rack and flog him, we may never know.