All this floor-crossing has the manne at the Dorsbult quite confused. In fact we spent so much time redrawing our colour-coded diagram of the National Assembly that Oom Krisjan had no time to remark on the movements last week.
However, now that we have sourced enough different coloured crayons to signify all of the new parties Lemmer can bring you the skinder on what happened.
United Democratic Movement leader Bantu Holomisa must be cursing modern communications technology. His deputy Nick Koornhof left a message on his cell to say he was defecting to the African National Congress. Five years ago Holomisa also got to hear via the telephone that he was on the way out of his former party, the ANC.
The proclaimed ”spiritual experience” by Pauline Cupido, who left the Western Cape Democratic Alliance for the African Christian Democratic Party, may just have been — well, a smokescreen. Apparently a member of her and her husband’s constituency called their house just before the deadline to find out whether they’d be going canvassing. The husband said yes, but without the wife because ”she’ll defect on Monday”.
At least one colour crayon was spared as the Gauteng Greens have haughtily declared floor-crossing to be ”unprincipled maneuvering for short-term political gain, by dishonest, opportunistic, selfish, greedy and of short-term vision politicians and political parties”. It will not accept defectors.
To Lemmer this sounds a bit like sour grapes — we didn’t hear of any stampede to greener pastures.
Breathless
The perils of committing yourself to print (or pixel, or whatever) are legendary. How many media pundits have awoken the next morning to the unpleasant sensation of egg all over their faces as events prove them spectacularly wrong.
So spare a thought for tourism officials in Hong Kong. As the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic devastates the industry, spreading fear among travellers worldwide, the local tourist board must rue the day it commissioned a series of magazine adverts with the slogan: ”Hong Kong will take your breath away.”
The 10th province
As temperatures rise in the KwaZulu-Natal legislature the bristling MPLs have kept Lemmer busy. The ANC’s Mtholephi Mthimkhulu in his motion pointed out that one of the provinces listed in the Constitution is called KwaZulu-Natal and then expressed surprise that Office of the Premier of KwaZulu-Natal has a new letterhead that describes it as the ”Office of the Premier — Kingdom of KwaZulu”. He has therefore called for an urgent investigation into whether Mtshali has ”unilaterally decided to unconstitutionally rename the province of KwaZulu-Natal”.
All that jazz
After Luthuli House went around grumbling that the ANC’s provincial structures in the Eastern Cape had decided on a date for the conference (April 5 and 6) without consulting the members of the national task team, Premier Makhenkesi Stofile let the cat out of the bag this week. He told the Mail & Guardian that after the ANC’s national executive committee meeting last month the province had, in fact, asked the national task team to press ahead with the meeting as originally planned on the last weekend of March. But members of the national task team sought a postponement to the following weekend because they wanted to attend the North Sea Jazz Festival in Cape Town.
Free to rig?
E.tv reporter Patrick ”Kortbroek” Conroy, perhaps keen to impress war supremo Debra ”Mummy” Patta, made a sterling contribution to the war effort this week (that’s the free-to-air channel’s war with
the SABC, not the other one). He sent an e-mail to e.tv’s entire
news team with the subject line ”Election rigging”:
”Marketingweb.co.za is running an online poll to determine if viewers think e-news live at 7 is better than the new SABC bulletin. With 30 votes cast so far we lead by 58,7% to 30%.
”Now, I’ve spoken to the authors of such phrases as ‘regime change’ and ‘collateral damage’, and they advise me that this would not be vote rigging in the strictest sense of the word, but rather something we like to call ‘internal marketing’.
”So if you feel the urge, log on and do your bit for democracy.”
Potty training
Lemmer must confess that he has never achieved total mastery of sectoral education and training authorities (Setas) and relies completely on his more educated chommies (he has a few) for insights into this brave new world. So he was delighted to be told something he can actually understand about the Education, Training and Development Practices Seta. Seems the beleaguered CEO, Nomlamli Mahanjana — whose record so far has been sufficiently messy for the Seta’s board to take an interest — decided to clean up her act with a bold initiative. She’s built a toilet! Yes! For her sole and exclusive use, nogal. And in a move of such taste and tact that Lemmer is put in mind of that other friend of the people, Marie Antoinette, the entrance to her private inner sanctum is adjacent to the staff kitchen. Let them eat kak?
Whipped by the chief
Other presidents go out of the way to cosset their presidential press corps. Not ours. At the launch of the corps last week, Thabo Mbeki basically told his duly assembled political hacks that they didn’t know one end of a chief whip from the other. ”When one sees the description ‘Agricultural correspondent’ on an article, you assume the writer knows something about agriculture. You can’t say the same about ‘political correspondents’,” he said. Ouch.
But that’s the way, boss-man, make sure they don’t get embedded.
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