Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon Since this week’s column is devoted to a passionate defence of Ms Felicia Mabuza-Suttle, I think I’m going to have to settle for using her initials: FMS. This might make her sound a bit like a financial house – which she has recently hinted she is – but it’s necessary. When an idol’s handle is this long, you have to use the abbreviation or there won’t be any space left for superlatives.
With FMS these tend to stack up. It’s now two weeks since she responded, with her natural sense of dignity, to some typically low slander heaped on her head by Krisjan Lemmer.
In doing so, FMS yielded a tantalising glimpse into the opulent inner person. After reading her letter, I tore through to my book-lined study, levered my Monrovian sun-python off the chaise longue and started composing a vigorous panegyric. Something in support of FMS’s touching letter.
It’s taken me two weeks. At times I felt my eulogic tenacity sag, lose step with the dizzy international standards of its subject. When you write about FMS, you can’t just toss it off. You need to consider, perpend before shouting your plaudits. Reflect before falling to your knees.
Here’s what has surfaced after waiting the requisite 10 days demanded by my muse’s union. Felicia Mabuza-Suttle is wasted on South Africa. With qualities like hers, it would be an act of leviathan charity if she went global.
And when I say global, I don’t mean globular. As she was so anxious to tell us all a year or so ago, FMS spent lank bucks in stopping herself from going globular, especially round the back – a physical locus often described by cynical gym instructors as “Cellulite City”.
As FMS snapped at some impudent Sunday Times reporter, when questioned about the alleged R870 000 turbo-suction and sacking-needles bill: “I had to do it. People were starting to call me `the Ship of the Desert’ – even when I was sitting down. My public demanded that I undergo these excruciating surgical procedures so as to continue to look as beautiful as God originally intended me to be.”
What I mean is FMS should go global in the global sense. She should unfurl her cloak of eleemosynary gift on a wider stage, her sense of personal worth and wealth. Let the rest of the world see how she dispenses what she described as a “humane gesture” in giving a couple of spare World Cup tickets to a “disabled fan”. (Spiralled in pain, crippled sycophants still follow her everywhere. Who knows what other benefice might slough off and waft downwind?)
In shrugging off the Lemmer slur, FMS expands on why it is preposterous to believe she should have tried to sell a few of her spare World Cup tickets to a passing South African journalist – at a mark-up of 400%. According to the journalist, Julian Drew, FMS hastily withdrew the offer of sale when he told her what he did for a living, immediately offering him the tickets again, this time for free. Watching over all these frantic transactions was Mr Tokyo Sexwale – whatever that signifies.
FMS denied all this. “The other (ticket) was given to a young fan at the VIP entrance” to the ground. Indeed, where else would you expect a woman of Felicia’s significance to enter?
She then explained she has no need to tout soccer tickets as she’s a woman of considerable personal wealth.
“I don’t need chump change,” humped FMS. Indeed she doesn’t. She’s a woman of such financial elegance as to be able to afford “at least three overseas vacations a year, someone who wears nothing but Escada and Laurel outfits”. She maintains “two $1- million homes”.
But it was when she got to talking about her accomplishments in the humanities that FMS really strode hightailed. Here she has dispensed favour, altruism, pauper-friendliness and charity in such unlimited quantities as to bemuse we humble folk. Women and children, drug addicts, destitute mothers have been the recipients of her eager mercies. Like a Statue of Liberty waiting to be managed by Allan Boesak.
We are not talking some ambling philanthropist here, some morals-and- sackcloth bag-person with her tits in a twitch about human rights for foetus-rapers. We are talking Felicia Mabuza-Suttle, the Mother Theresa of SABC 2.
It is time Felicia stopped casting herself before media swine like Drew and Lemmer. Go out into the wider world, my dear. There you won’t even have to explain yourself.
Please don’t wait.