Robert Kirby : Loose cannon
The Christmas hols done with, it’s time once again to reflect on how we did as a nation honouring this fine occasion.
As of going to press, South Africa’s extermination road network was doing quite well in its disciplined attempt to outstrip last year’s carnage. With but a day or three left, the number of road-deaths was approaching the 1 000 mark and politicians were bragging about how successful they’d been in keeping our roads in slaughter mode.
And they had reason to feel proud. Democracy is definitely starting to work when the one thing you can say about post- 1994 South African drivers is that they are without any traditional socio-political bias when it comes to driving like suicidal cretins.
Any colour is fair game when a South African motorist has a three- or four-litre under his eager feet and a blood-alcohol count in the same league. Black drivers kill white ones while the whites mow down Indians or try to crash their elitist vehicles at high speed into the rusted “apartheid’s penalty” wrecks belonging to drunken, previously disadvantaged people who surge around after midnight without having remembered to turn the lights on.
Apart from all the legalised killing on the roads, we kept up our Christ’s Birthday standards when it came to stabbing, shooting or raping our neighbours to death.
I know that South Africa’s three occult ministerial primates, Sydney Mufamadi, Dullah Omar and Sipo Mzimela – otherwise known as Catch No Evil, Prosecute No Evil and Confine No Evil – are in a state of self-devotional preenshock now that they’ve managed to lambast the national daily murder rate down from 75 to 65.
But this doesn’t mean we, as a nation of homicidal psychopaths, need be discouraged. Thanks to these three gents, more and more sick people are being cured by the healing knives of gang members, few of whom have ever heard of Cuba.
Why send unhealthy folk to hospital when they can be killed off on the streets for next to nothing? The economics of modern health management are complex but, in the end, often make sense. Anyway, Dr Zuma deserves some sort of break.
Otherwise, it’s been a great Christmas. South African businessmen didn’t make as much money as last year but since their commercial manner has become about 10 times cruder and self-pitying, they didn’t deserve better.
Apart from the above, Christmas came without nearly enough fuss being made in the white-owned racist press about the splendid “Xmas Gift to the Nation” with which the generous Mr Mandela endowed us – now that he’s running out of Boesaks.
Incidentally, you might like to know that you can now buy a Dr Boesak Tamagotshi (Christian Batteries Not Included). The toy bites its owner and poos on his tie every time he forgets to plug the suction-tube into overseas church funds.
Mr Mandela’s Christmas present was diplomatic recognition of Communist-China- as-no-one-likes-to-call-it-any-more-now-
that-Tiananmen-Square-is-just-another-
squalid-memory. We really are gathering international friends and trading partners quickly as Mr M’s past sub-rosa allies call in their chips.
And they are being paid in good coin. For someone like Colonel Gadaffi, a world pariah in all eyes save those of Saddam Hussein and Tony Blair, it must be heart- warming to feel that feathery Nelson-slap on your back as the great man listens patiently to your latest Lockerbie 747 knock-knock jokes.
Nor quivered shriek of trumpet, South Africa now inscribes Red China on its guest list – yet another dictatorship to add mandarin charm to the happy bustle down what was once a grim gangplank, and one shunned during the struggle years by the likes of President “I Love East Timor” Suharto, Sani Abacha, Mobutu Sese Seko and his Mercedes. In starting with South Africa, Beijing has been inspired. Where better than Pretoria to launch the second colonisation of Africa?
Led by the cracked tones of Alfred Nzo, out throbs Africa’s latest yielding dirge:
From Cape Town to grottos that knew Ali Baba
From Kenya to Ghana, that gullible smile: “If we give you our inch, will you take Pelindaba?
If we give you our sky, will you drink up the Nile?”
ENDS