Last Friday President Thabo Mbeki made his annual State of the Nation speech to Parliament. As expected the occasion exposed us to another display of the bossman’s ebullient wordplay, another glimpse across the bright fabric of a mind that passeth all common understanding. As before, the speech brimmed with the arcane, the occult. There was riddle and enigma, much
will be simply impenetrable as when Mr Mbeki spoke of the need to “push back the frontiers” of both poverty and freedom. Hosts of bemused journalists and commentators have had a busy old time struggling to detect what shadowed subtexts cowered among the luminous shafts of the Mbeki intellect.
In this forbidding task the SABC, of course, led the way, simply because up in Auckland Park they don’t go around looking for deconstructional trouble. When confronted by an oven-fresh presidential masterwork, Snuki, his new apprentice, Mathata Tsedu, and the lads have been trained to respond only to those bits of the speech they recognise — like “sit”, “shake hands”, “heel”, “play dead” and so on. It’s the wretched political editors who have had to slash their way through the ripening paradigms and pendant discrepancies, the dense thickets of presidential hyperbole.
Whatever else he said last week you could have bet a pound to a bag of green vipers Mr Mbeki wouldn’t be reflecting in any way on the steadily increasing catalogue of his own profligacies, let alone those of the African National Congress Pacmen he leads with such style and charm.
Personal glorification and glistening affluence are become the sine qua non of the current South African ruling clique. Not that this is anything new in the diaries of this continent’s post-colonial “rectifications”. One’s mind slips gloomily back to Kwame Nkrumah’s gold bed, to Mobuto’s Cote d’Azure estates, to numerous other lootings by liberation’s kleptocrats. Not that things are changing much. A glance at the astutely researched listing in a recent Sunday Times of Looney Bob’s lavish spending habits and you can’t help but feel nervous.
Call it coincidence or even eerie old Jungian synchronicity, but last week, when I watched a lengthy French television production of the Dumas classic, The Count of Monte Cristo, I couldn’t help but notice an uncanny resemblance in plot. The original was the inspiring tale of Edmond Dantes, falsely accused as a Bonapartiste conspirator and locked up in the horrific Chateau d’If for many years. Eventually Dantes escapes and, following the raving advice of one of his dying ex-fellow convicts, digs up an immense buried fortune on a remote island. This treasure Dantes disposes on setting up an ostentatious and extravagant lifestyle that tips the Parisian high society of the early 1800s on to its elbows. Behind this gaudy camouflage Dantes plans and executes pitiless revenge on those who wronged him. A wonderful story and a metaphor for all those who through history have suffered the iniquities visited on them by the powerful and greedy.
They say that really great stories get told again and again, so doesn’t that one remind you of a certain local notable — weakly punned in the headline to this column and in humble acknowledgement of our president’s Mugabe-like partiality for gravy? I’ll admit the allegory stretches a bit thin here and there but when it comes to ostentation, another subject that wasn’t mentioned in last Friday’s speech was the R12-million “personal air terminal” Mr Mbeki is having built for himself at Cape Town International Airport — just across the road from one of Africa’s largest and most abject squatter encampments. In spitting distance, as it were.
True to the Dantes story our president has felt the need to emulate if not outdo others. But he has to flabbergast much more than a capricious Parisian society. Hence there recently has been a measure or rather clattery striding around the world stage by M Mbeki. For this to continue in style there has to be something to go with the personal air terminal: the new presidential airliner. At R500-million a mere snip of the treasure. Anything less would gravely understate. Soon, when Thabo makes his entrances to global political society it will be with a flourish, something compatible with his significance. Spending a further R108-million on furnishing the same personal airliner with 10 seats, a stateroom and an all-races bogger is small beer. Flying this palatial Boeing to and from Europe at about a million-and-a half a trip is what we gladly pay taxes for.
These monetary binges, so reminiscent of those of Edmond Dantes, were not mentioned last week. I know it sounds cynical but, as with Dantes, our president sometimes seems to be working a well-financed retribution on all the ghastly colonial people he believes have so wronged him and his many comrades. He might have been locked up in the horrific Sussex University for many years but he mustn’t think that now, while he avenges past offences, he’s necessarily going to be surrounded, as Dantes was, by adoring hordes of the fabulous, the wanton beauties of Paris. Miranda Strydom will just have to do.
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