Say what you like, Jessie Duarte has further refined and developed the undervalued political art of giving the finger to the world. When it doesn’t suit her, Jessie tells entire commissions of inquiry to go stuff themselves. Just one of many swerves and skids she practised in a fast-lane career launched during the years of struggle.
Seen in this light, can we blame Jessie for getting the whole business of what constitutes “legalised” driving completely arse about face? She’s clearly forgotten some basic distinctions. I’m sure she won’t mind if I refresh her memory.
First, there’s the so-called “real world” of driving around on what are called “public roads”. Here, when you slip behind the wheel of the shiny limousine your struggle investments have earned you, you are required to have something called a valid driver’s licence, regardless of where, or how you didn’t get it. (In obeisance to Jessie’s blithe spirit, there’ll probably be some new questions included on those forms. [4] If you do not have a valid driver’s licence, where did you not get it? [5] How long have you not had it?)
Out in the “real world” they insist that people driving motor- vehicles are able to show some proof they know how to control and aim them.
This is simply because no one likes picking up all the broken bodies that could result when some arrogant, supercilious, lofty, inefficient, disdainful, smug, self-pitying politician believes she’s above the trivialities which govern ordinary folk.
Next, the other kind: “political carriageways”. It’s in the fast lanes of these that a driver’s licence is disadvantageous. In South Africa’s version of these highways, the less you know about controlling your criminally expensive government administrative vehicle, the better.
When, like Jessie Duarte, you’re in charge of piloting an entire safety and security portfolio down a lickety-split post- apartheid freeway, you are expected to hurl it around the place like a deranged pantechnicon. If you don’t, everyone else will start believing you have the faintest idea of what you are doing. That you actually can operate the ungainly brute.
Under current rules-of-the-political-road this is the quickest way to get front-ended by a usually bigger and more lunatic political driver than you are.
There’s a whole department at what used to be called Shell House, on hand to advise the ship of state exactly who among its barnacles is least likely to drive in a straight bureaucratic line, to keep the fuel costs down, signal when changing lanes, point more or less in the direction of the required destination, keep a safe distance from the fiscus-snatcher in front. Or do you think it was just sheer luck they got Professor Bengu?
What’s become an increasingly confusing task for the authorities responsible is a pestilence called political road rage.
PRR takes over whenever driver- politicians collide with each other, when one of them overtakes the others on the boulevard to foreign funding, when someone gets unfairly accused of pettifoggery like taking the boyfriend on a free Spanish holiday at the taxpayers’ expense, employing friends at R300 000 per.
The first law of PRR states that everything that goes wrong must be blamed on past, present and future racism. PRR is truly prodigal. It can be applied to the real world, too.
Let’s say someone like saucy Jess crashes a government vehicle.
Subsequently it is revealed that the only driver’s licence Jessie possesses is invisible, therefore she has no option but to tell a complicated dish of lies about the crash.
Jessie can blame past racism: the “apartheid” years and the fact that, during these, she couldn’t risk exposing herself to driving examiners for fear of being recognised, what’s more locked away as an activist against brutal white South African hegemony.
Present racism is what drove a power-maddened Mail & Guardian to find out about her invisible driver’s licence and then smear it all over their tabloid rag.
Future racism is evident in the fact that, should the unlikely event ever occur, that Jessie Duarte actually applies for a “real world” driver’s licence and, unlike someone else we know, goes through all the necessary tests, she might fail. I’ll give you one guess what will be blamed.
And so, as the vehicle wreckage slowly sinks into the past, we take our leave of impudent Jess. We wish her well in her continuing fight for justice and equality for all.
Fade up stirring music and run end titles over shot of Duarte angrily kicking heels.