Krisjan Lemmer
Krisjan Lemmer has decided to introduce an annual “Zuma Award” for the public official making the most innovative appeal to racism to cover up government incompetence. The prize is an all-expenses-paid weekend in George with the Groot Krokodil as host.
The award is named after the Minister of Health in tribute to her charge this week that the Democratic Party is racist because it has drawn attention to an apparent financial link between the manufacturers of Virodene and the African National Congress. “The DP hates ANC supporters. If they had it their way we would all die of Aids,” she observed. Pass me the sick bag, Nkosazana!
It was, however, a close run thing, with Minister of Minerals and Energy Penuell Maduna making a gallant bid to claim the award. When the Mail & Guardian called him this week our reporter was subjected to a tirade.
His complaint: the reporter had earlier asked officials in the department whether the minister had really written an incomprehensible, five-page press release – a “preliminary response” to the Bakker inquiry he set up to look into the scandal surrounding the Central Energy Fund and Emmanuel Shaw II.
“You bloody racist,” yelled the minister. “Is it unacceptable for you to think that I, a black man, can write a legal document? I have a doctorate in law!”
An extract from the document that the minister is so proud to have penned: “Though the report relates specifically to the contract between the Central Energy Fund (Pty) Ltd (hereinafter referred to as the CEF) and the International Advisory Service (hereinafter referred to as the IAS) its title purports to be about the appointment of Mr Shaw II personally as an adviser to the CEF. This may legitimately be regarded as reflective of a bias deriving from an unavoidable influence by the media, particularly the Mail & Guardian, which have tended to, wittingly or unwittingly, conflate all manner of allegations made against the said Mr Shaw II as a person with the appointment of the IAS, a consulting firm, as an adviser to the CEF.
“Needless to say, though such allegations, the veracity of which can only be determined by a competent court of law or similar tribunal, cannot totally be ignored, they do not seem to have been relevant to the task of the Bakker team.”
Lemmer’s heard of obfuscation before, but that verbiage would have been enough to camouflage the D-Day landings.
In an interview in the latest edition of the Financial Mail, the chief executive of the CEF, Don Mkhwanazi, pays tribute to his old buddy, Emmanuel Shaw II, with the memorable quote: “He has expertise, knowledge and I find him very enriching.” A Freudian slip?
Angry scowls cross the Dorsbult Bar, sounds of drum-rolls and carpenters hammering nails into a makeshift scaffold in the hen-run out the back. A lynching is clearly in the making, with eyes on Lemmer’s neck. The subject of his colleagues’ wrath: an item in this column last week referring to Tony Stirling – news editor of The Citizen and one-time Sapa reporter who has just died of a heart attack – as a former security force spy.
Nevertheless, indignant former colleagues have protested that, although he was in the category of journalists useful to the police, there is no evidence he worked “formally” for them.
In an effort to make peace, Lemmer offers, with apologies, a local variation on a famous ditty about British hacks. “You cannot hope to bribe or twist,/thank God, the South African journalist./But seeing what the man will do/unbribed, there’s no occasion to.”
Readers may recall the dreadful plight of the three Zairean generals, Kpama Baramoto, Mudima Mavua and Ngbale Nzimbi, who fled to South Africa following the fall of president Mobutu Sese Seko to Laurent Kabila’s victorious army last year. The three claimed they were penniless and had been forced to borrow even the clothes they were wearing.
Last week a throwaway item in the daily rags reported that robbers posing as policemen had burgled Baramoto’s home in Wendywood. Their haul? “A briefcase with watches, diamond rings and R2-million.”
Golly, but these generals sure can lift themselves up by their own bootstraps, can’t they?
One of the burdens of rejoining the international community is being plugged into the goings-on of the jet set. Of course under apartheid the jet set made use of South Africa, but at least we didn’t hear of them. Out of sight, out of mind.
But now that South Africa has become a PC destination, Lemmer is being inundated with dispatches on the goings-on of the likes of one Dai Llewellyn.
Dai who? Dai, explains Nigel Dempster in the Daily Mail, is a 51-year-old baronet-to-be who was “unexpectedly detained at the Mount Nelson, Cape Town, after finding himself without cash following a sojourn at the famed hotel’s bar.
“Former Warwickshire county cricketer Roger Hamilton-Brown, who was staying at the ‘Nellie’, returned to his suite to find messages from the manager to the effect that a friend of his had run up an account which had not been settled.
“Says Roger, 52, who proposed Mark Thatcher for membership of the Royal Cape Golf Club two years ago only for his nominee to be turned down: ‘A mutual friend, Joss Walker of the Johnny Walker whisky firm, went down and settled the bill, which was for less than six pounds. But just before he signed, Dai said he was rather distraught and could he sting Joss for just one more drink? He did.'”
What can it all mean?