South African Airways (SAA) flights on the London route appear to be full of fun. First there was the couple copulating in business class. Now there is the strange story of the berserk poet.
A court in the United Kingdom has been hearing evidence of how the poet, one John Bagwell, aged 42, erupted into less-than- poetic language when passengers in the smoking section lit up shortly after take- off.
“He leapt to his feet and screamed that they were immediately to put these cigarettes out,” the court was told. Incensed when they refused, he demanded to see the pilot.
Told that the Captain Johannes de Wet was busy flying an aeroplane, Bagwell is alleged to have then stormed the cockpit. Screaming and shouting abuse “like a man possessed”, he was “shaking, red-faced, gesticulating”.
He was manhandled off the flight deck, but continued his tirade, spitting rage at crew. Passengers were reduced to tears by the poet’s performance, according to the purser, Charmaine Blumrick.
The court was told that SAA was one of the last remaining airlines to allow smoking on flights. Bagwell’s fate still has to be decided by the court, but Lemmer – an enthusiastic smoker – fears that even his knock-out conviction and deserved deportation to the land of the sheep- shaggers will prove but to have been a pyrrhic victory in the epic struggle for the right of mankind to have a quiet and undisturbed puff from time to time.
It must be self-evident to any reasonable physician that Bagwell is a man sorely deprived of the calming effects of a cigarette. But our Minister of Health, Nkosazana Zuma, will no doubt offer this strange tale as further evidence of the dangers of passive smoking.
Public Protector Selby Baqwa’s probe into state oil shenanigans provided more entertainment last week when the Minister of Minerals and Energy, Penuell Maduna, grovelled for an opportunity to explain why he made the false allegation that R170- million of oil had been filched from the government.
After incurring two days of opprobrium over the admission, Maduna’s counsel asked the public protector if his client could jump the queue to take the witness stand and account for himself. Maduna was seemingly so confident that Baqwa would respect the ministerial demand that the night before his office had issued a press release inviting journalists to attend his performance.
Unfortunately for the minister, Baqwa refused the application and gave him an ear-bashing for anticipating his decision.
Unashamed, Maduna’s minions then started organising a press briefing, circulating a massive bundle of documents to journalists which were supposed to explain “the context” of Maduna’s attack against the auditor general last June.
But then Maduna’s press secretary emerged from the hearing to advise eager hacks that Baqwa had discouraged Maduna from holding the press conference.
Maduna also played his “trump card” this week, when his advocate brought up the matter of an affidavit from the secretary of former oil chief Kobus van Zyl – whose axing by Maduna triggered the whole controversy – saying he asked her to destroy evidence he had passed on confidential documents from Maduna to an Egyptian oil trader the day he was suspended last year.
But Mail & Guardian readers have heard it all before … the newspaper published details of this “new” evidence earlier this year.
Allister Sparks certainly has a taste for new careers. Not content with having edited the Rand Daily Mail, achieved an international reputation as a foreign correspondent, analysed The Mind of South Africa (for the information of the ignorant, the title of a book he wrote), launched the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism and headed news and current affairs at the SABC, Sparks is now apparently determined to become the country’s Walter Cronkite.
That, at any rate, is what his staff assume from his insistence on being auditioned for the job as Chris Gibbons’s stand-in on News Hour when the latter took leave recently.
It was not an easy audition, Lemmer hears. Someone had the mischievous idea of making Max du Preez – the frustrated garlic farmer who somehow wound up as a television superstar through his (admittedly impressive) coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – the subject of an interview by Sparks. Du Preez was playing the role of his lookalike, he of the blowtorch eyes, Eugene Terre’Blanche.
By all accounts he had great fun with his boss, pre-empting Sparks’s questions with a denunciation of him as an “enemy of the volk” and so forth, and demanding what right he had to ask questions of the glorious leader of the pigmentally disadvantaged.
Whether or not as a consequence of these underhand tactics, the SABC training department which adjudicated the proceedings judged that Sparks needed a little more polish before following in Cronkite’s footsteps.
But, knowing Sparks, it is only a matter of time before the sight of the great man leering out of the small box in the corner of the room will become an everyday feature of all our lives. That’s if he doesn’t decide to become an astronaut in the meantime.
A glance at the diary reminds that we have just passed the second anniversary of the fight by the alleged king of South African fraudsters, Oliver Hill, to avoid extradition back home from the UK.
Lemmer hears that Hill’s lawyer has written to a journalist protesting at his familiar references to Hill by his old nickname, “Fat Ollie” – pointing out that after two years languishing in Brixton prison his client no longer counts a weight problem among his troubles.
The said journalist has taken to referring to him as “formerly Fat Ollie”.
Talking about alleged fraudsters, British police have asked Interpol to look out for a South African lawyer practising in Essex who is accused of decamping with some R4,5-million of his clients’ money.
It is suspected that Brian Maisch may be back in South Africa, hiding out under an assumed identity.
So now any of his old mates who might have run across him in the street know why they earned a blank look when they cried out: “Howzit, Brian!”