The World Economic Forum’s Southern African economic summit in Windhoek this week provided an object lesson in what lies behind the woes of the continent.
Like the arrival of Zambian President Frederick Chiluba – who has been appealing for debt relief from foreign donors – with retinue in a state-of-the-art Falcon 500 executive jet.
Delegates from the industrialised world had difficulty coming to terms with African time.
“I heard port officials boast that logjams had been reduced to two weeks from four weeks,” said a bewildered Malcolm Hughes, chief executive of British management consultants, Proudfoot. “Internationally we don’t think in weeks, but hours.”
Agreed the African president of Coca-Cola, Carl Ware: “It takes a little time and a little patience to do business on this continent.”
The proof of it all was there, in the service. An order for a hamburger at the four-star Safari Club took two hours to deliver.
The Safari hotel, where the conference was being held, offered no porters and had grossly over-booked, forcing delegates to double up.
A housekeeper complained that staff had three washing machines and one ironing-press to service the 800 rooms.
South African Deputy President Thabo Mbeki pitched up with only a single bodyguard in a sombre business suit, and our Cabinet ministers piled into buses with other delegates – in sharp contrast with other Cabinet ministers and heads of state who surrounded themselves with phalanxes of uniformed bodyguards and travelled in ostentatious motorcades with lights flashing.
Booby prize at the summit went to Michael Jackson who surrounded himself with more bodyguards than any head of state and took the stage to make a squeaky call for “kindness to children”.
The man has no sense of irony.
What shall we call them – Motshekgarisms?
Admirers of the Gauteng premier’s style of governance will have already filed away his proposals to deal with criminals – “take them to the nearest empty building where we will find them guilty and beat them up” – and high food prices – “I am going to buy some farms outside Johannesburg and we are going to put all the lazy people and the criminals on those farms and they are going to produce food for free.”
Now, to add to the collection, we have his plans to deal with police involvement in the taxi war.
Special taxi courts are going to be set up, he announced at the weekend. They would then repossess all taxis owned by police, who would be compelled to continue paying instalments on the vehicles which would be donated to widows and widowers who had lost their spouses in taxi violence.
Can’t wait to hear his plans for global warming!
Some confusion is reported at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT)medical school as to what should be done with the head of a Scottish woman with which they have been landed. The head is the one triumphantly brought back to South Africa by Nicholas Mbambatho two years ago.
Mbambatho, it might be remembered, claimed to be a Xhosa chief who had been instructed by a vision to travel to the United Kingdom and recover the head of a 19th-century ancestor, King Hintsa, which had been seized as a curio by British troops.
“Chief Gcaleka”, as Mbambatho styled himself, wore a leopard skin and waved a fly-swatter with great effect, eventually being rewarded in his search by a Scottish family who had a spare head lying in their garden shed and presented it to him.
Mbambatho, pronouncing this to be the remains of King Hintsa, returned to South Africa only to be met by police who dispatched the head to UCT for examination.
Anatomists declared it to be the head of a woman and Mbambatho was charged with fraud. Now UCT is anxiously trying to find a way of returning it to its rightful owner.
Anyone going to the UK with room in their luggage for a lost head?
When the organisers of the African Cup of Nations called for a minute’s silence in Burkino Faso earlier this year to mark the death of soccer great Ndaye Mulamba, many a tear was wiped from the cheeks of those who remembered this player of dazzling genius who notched up no less than nine goals in the 1974 tournament in Egypt.
Less tearful was Mulamba himself who, it transpires, is alive, if not particularly well, and living in Cape Town.
Fans in Burkino Faso were told that the Zairean star had been killed in a diamond mining accident in Angola. The truth is almost as tragic, according to African Football magazine, which found him in South Africa.
At the African Cup of Nations in 1994 – the 20th anniversary of his extraordinary feats in Egypt – he was honoured by the Confederation of African Football. Returning home from Tunis he was attacked by renegade soldiers who shattered his right leg with bullets – intent on robbing him of the cash they assumed had been presented to him. Losing a son in the violence accompanying the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, he drifted to Cape Town where he lives on charity, still carrying fragments of the bullets in his leg.
Are there any football-loving philanthropists out there?
The suggestion being put to the Lambeth conference – under the imprimaturs of the Archbishop of Cape Town, the Most Reverend Njongonkulu Ndungane – that the bar against polygamy should be reconsidered will excite many males who see it as a licence for a threesome.
But they might do well to heed a voice of experience. “When there’s just two wives, it’s hell,” warns Utah Mormon Bart Malstrom.
He finds five wives work better. He sleeps with them on a strict rota – two nights with each, in the order in which they were married. “The more you add, the more it is balanced out,” he explains.
Sounds too much like hard work to Lemmer. Especially selling the idea to Mevrou Lemmer.