Krisjan Lemmer
Last week Die Burger ran a sanctimonious article chiding two eminent neurologists for disclosing details of former president PW Botha’s stroke in his spat with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The crime the medics commited: disclosing to the world, without asking Botha’s permission, that the old crocodile had probably become mentally unstable as a result of the stroke he suffered in 1989, which could have impaired his ability to give evidence.
PW’s former mouthpiece appears to have been suffering similar difficulties with the notion of right and wrong for some years, an affliction not improved by the fact that the rest of the country has embraced democracy.
One of the targets of the newspaper’s vitriolic article was Professor Kay de Villiers. The very same De Villiers was liberally quoted on the same medical details in Leierstryd, a book on Botha’s last stint in power that was published eight years ago. The authors of that book: Alf Ries, the National Party’s most infamous party hack and long-time political editor of Die Burger, and Ebbe Domisse, the editor of Die Burger himself.
Seeing this was the journalistic team that refused to go before the truth commission and admit their Goebbelsesque coverage of almost half a century of apartheid tyranny, is this sudden burst of memory loss so surprising?
First prize for chutzpah must go to Don Mkhwanazi, the well-known crook-about-town, who last week threw in the towel as chair of the Central Energy Fund (CEF). In a press statement he grandiloquently announced that he had decided to decline the post, for fear that a “hostile media campaign” would detract from the CEF’s efforts to transform itself. “The interests of the CEF and the process of transformation transcend my interests as an individual,” he declared piously. This after the Mail & Guardian had publicly accused him of: taking kickbacks from a notorious Liberian crook, Emanuel Shaw II; giving a company run by Shaw a R3-million contract to act as advisers to the CEF after his own lawyers set up the company a few months earlier; writing threatening letters to a top civil servant who opposed Shaw’s appointment, etc etc.
Mkhwanazi dismissed these allegations as “artificially generated controversy” and accused the M&G of conducting a “sustained and malicious” personal vendetta against him. In a way one cannot help but admire the man. Even if one would not consider buying a second-hand oil rag from him.
If Mkhwanazi is the undisputed champion where chutzpah is concerned, the award for mealie-mouthed journalism must go to one Patrick Lawlor, editor of a column in Business Report, improbably entitled Business Watch. Congratulating Mkhwanazi on his re- appointment (Mkhwanazi, thankfully, was not re-appointed), Lawlor dismisses critics of the Don as “nit-pickers” and observes that “all loose ends and accused people should be afforded a chance to prove their innocence before being pilloried in unsubstantiated allegations”. At R3-million, some nit!
An M&G hack recently appeared on Sir David Frost’s morning show on board the QE2 while it was docked in Durban. Afterwards the hack asked Frost who his favourite interviewee was. Nelson Mandela, Sammy Davis Jnr and Richard Nixon were three he mentioned. But his absolute favourite was Billy Graham, the first person he interviewed when starting out as a television correspondent and whom he had interviewed many times over the years. “After he contracted a terminal illness, I asked Graham did he ever wonder why, if God was a God of love, He had given him this disease,” recalled Frost. Graham answered: “No, God is God, He can do as he pleases.” Such loyalty!
A member of the QE2 crew made the observation that the average age of passengers on the luxury liner was 75. Which is something of an improvement on last year’s three-month, round-the-world cruise where the average age was 85. But the age profile does make it statistically inevitable that a couple of guests will breathe their last during each trip. Since the present cruise began in December, five have already “popped off” and “a few more will probably pop off before it ends in New York at the end of April”. And you thought Titanic was all about youthful romance ?
Cape Town has its mountain, Durban has its beaches and Gauteng has … well … not much, if offerings from the sub-regional tourism authorities are any measure. Asked what the top tourism sites in eastern Gauteng are, a representative of the authority in the east suggested the East Rand Mall and Eastgate. The poppie who handles tourism for southern Gauteng recommended that visitors try the Vaal River and Pick ‘n Pay. Why visit a supermarket? “Because it’s big,” she said. No wonder tourism figures show that most foreign visitors spend no more than two days in Gauteng.
Why is Bill Clinton accompanied by such a large entourage when he travels? One possible answer is that it is to ensure there is somebody around who will recognise him. That, at least, is the lesson learnt by the Brits last week when a more modest collection of diplomats gathered to welcome the British minister, Peter Kilfoyle, to the fairest Cape. As Kilfoyle emerged from the aircraft, the high commissioner’s party advanced … right past him, descending instead on a bewildered tourist whom they greeted with much shaking of hands and slaps on the back. “They had been told to look for a man with a moustache,” explained the minister afterwards. Maybe they were confused by the camouflage of a stiff upper lip.
Headline of the week must have been the front-page splash in The Citizen on Monday which trumpeted: “Possible McBride had been framed”. Someone must have finally got around to seeing the headline on the front page of the M&G three weeks ago, which offered: “How McBride was set up”.
There was much jostling and elbowing along the corridors of power in the entertainment world this week as media personalities hurried to get on the right side of Midi television following their coup in scooping the first private, free-to-air broadcasting licence. One who jostled her way to the front of the queue offering kisses, congratulations and flowers to the winners was Cawe Mahlati who, as head of the Afrimedia group, was among the losers. Cawe, known to her friends as “Kamikaze” Mahlati, was previously the head of Bop-TV. She had busied herself during the IBA hearings distributing confidential documents in an attempt to dish the dirt on Bop-TV’s Jonathan Proctor and Dave Stewart, who headed the Midi bid. Seems Lucas Mangope commissioned a number of investigations into Proctor, who had infuriated the tin-pot dictator by standing up to him.
Much merriment at a recent beanfeast hosted by the South African Chamber of Business at which Zambian delegates put on a slide-show boasting of the business opportunities opening up in their part of the world. The captions to the slides noted that in Zambia there are gemstone opportunities by way of cutting, “ploshing” and jewellery-making and that in the food sector Zambians produced “nutjies and yorgart” of great potential. They added that opportunities abound with the “resustance” of the mining sector. They said nothing about the educational standards of the “wukfus”, however.