I always set aside all the daylight hours on the day of the state presidential State of the Nation speech. This is both to get my mind cleansed of any intrusive critical faculties and to make sure that, when I’m wandering around in a blissful daze afterwards, I don’t tread in any dog shit.
Everything came right again last Friday. Thabo Mbeki’s State of the Nation address was a small masterwork. As has become usual with our state president, his message mildly emphasised the positive and all but totally ignored the crucial.
I find it hard to pay attention for too long to what Mbeki is actually saying when he’s giving a speech on television because my attention quickly shifts from that to what his hands are doing.
As Mbeki speaks touchingly of the need for universal peace, forbearance and the petrol price, his hands are forever restless, continually adjusting and fiddling with his script, seeming to enjoy a life quite independent of their owner. In this case, a love life.
As he speaks, Mbeki’s hands perform what looks like the intricate mating dance of two small and lovable rainforest creatures. They swoop on each other, touch, twist and writhe in a sort of muted carnal rapture. Now and then the fingers stiffen and the hands collapse in seemingly ecstatic culmination to the foreplay, only suddenly to spiral up in resumption of their anxious ballet.
The pure white paper text of the speech, picked up and thrust here and there, continually tidied and bent into shape, is the waiting love nest for the hands. All that is needed to complete the illusion is the voice of David Attenborough explaining what it’s all about and how long one of the parents will have to sit on the eggs.
Last week the hands danced madly as Mbeki spoke of his annus optimisticus. What he avoided doing was reflecting too long on aspects of the annus horribilis that preceded the speech. Why spoil the occasion by referring to the numerous unnerving accidents that have taken place in the African National Congress fast lane?
Not when you’ve got one of your star Wabenzi speedsters in Tony Yengeni, sitting there in his exquisitely tailored suit quietly chatting into his Nokia 8820. Even his safety belt is bespoke.
Other treasured ANC icons were among the state president’s invited audience, one of these in the shape of the Very Reverend Allan ‘Steal Bread From The Poor” Boesak, accompanied by his loyal blonde wife. I hear they’re thinking of bringing out a new range of Elna Boesak Barbie dolls. Every time you squeeze one it inherits a R750 000 video studio.
I see no reason at all why Mbeki has received so much flak about his not paying yet more attention to the now monotonous stories about Robert Mugabe’s gifted Hitler impersonations. Thanks to a racially distorted media, everyone knows what’s going on in Zimbabwe.
It ill befits our state president to distend any further the machinations of those dedicated to the reimposition in Zimbabwe of such outdated neo-colonialist notions as freedom of speech, the rule of law and not scratching your knackers when there are ladies present.
In any event, the African Union has ceded all caution and custody of continental human rights into the dependable hands of Colonel Moammar Gadaffi. No need to worry about that any more.
Halfway through the speech came passing reference to another trusty standby of the Mbeki detractors: the overworked HIV/Aids crisis. It is one thing to have weekly protest marches by huge crowds of infected citizens most of whom wouldn’t be HIV-positive, anyway, but for their unspeakable sexual practices, but quite another to try to balance an economy where far worthier supplicants snatch at the fiscal purse.
Who but the deeply uncaring could possibly place the supply of hideously expensive anti-retrovirals for local rape victims as a priority above the humanitarian needs of Iraq? There are literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children about to be annihilated when they’re put up as human shields in the forthcoming Jewish-inspired American genocide. Aziz Pahad recently got this first-hand from one of the leading Saddam Hussein doubles.
I was a little disappointed not to hear one or two felicitous poetic quotations in Mbeki’s presentation. I’d heard that his speech-writers finally went out and bought a copy of the dependable Reader’s Digest Household Dictionary of Classical Quotations for All Occasions; this to ensure that they didn’t have their state president being mocked for inaccurately attributing quotations as he has done in the past.
The speech-writers should have used it this time round. There is no point in not allowing Thabs to demonstrate the depth of his reading.
Last week’s State of the Nation address was another triumph of the undervalued art of concealment. Often there is greater political profit in denial than in taking things on. Mbeki’s speech may have been as dull as ditchwater, but its real strengths lay in what he didn’t say. As Noël Coward once remarked: it was a triumph of never mind over doesn’t matter.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby