Hats for health
The manne clicked last week. The pres chose Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang for his Cabinet because of her millinery sense, amply on display at last year’s opening of Parliament. After all, she hasn’t remained in office for her deft handling of the HIV/Aids pandemic or ability to sweet-talk our doctors, nê? So we’re pleased to announce that African National Congress MP Gwen Mahlangu will be our next health minister. Look what she pulled out of her hat last week!
And the winner is …
It was a tough competition, smoothed by several Klipdrifts, but the Democratic Alliance’s damsel Dene Smuts this week takes the Political Hypocrite of the Week award. Dame Dene, a keen (and loud) campaigner for the independence of the public broadcaster, has sneakily been signing up ”journalists” for the party lists. Sies! Runner-up was signee Diane Kohler-Barnard (until hours ago the presenter of SAfm’s The Editors), who wins a Beginner’s Guide to Journalism nomination. May she learn that independence does not mean joining the opposition.
History forgotten
Politics makes for strange bedfellows, and never more so than before an election. At number nine on the DA’s Gauteng list is Mannie van Dyk — former Conservative Party candidate for Klerksdorp (1987) and former Freedom Front councillor (post-1994); ex-police director and one-time Pretoria deputy mayor.
He may have lost the Klerksdorp election race, but he is remembered for putting up life-size cardboard cutouts of himself along many streets.
Van Dyk stood as DA councillor in the December 2000 municipal poll — a decision that cost him his police career. After taking the police to court — twice — and winning, he was sacked from his director post following a disciplinary hearing for gross misconduct in April 2001. He then instructed attorneys to go to court for his reinstatement. And he took to court the letter-writer who called him a political chameleon in the Afrikaans newspaper Rapport.
Now he has beaten veteran politician Sheila Camerer, ex-NNP MP and former justice deputy minister, in the rankings — never mind other long-standing DA/DP members such as Mike Waters or Raenette Taljaard, the party’s voice on the arms deal who is nowhere to be found. And the DA insists it is not moving right.
Free to snooze
Oom Krisjan has always believed that we must defend our democracy — and those who lead it. But sometimes he just has to wonder.
A photographer captured Minister of Education Kader Asmal fast asleep during a recent function at Unisa to celebrate the launch of the distance education mega-institution created by the merger of three tertiary institutions.
But last week the newspaper that published the pic stood accused of — wait for it —belittling distance education by publishing the photo!
”His eyes were closed, but by his reactions it was clear that he was very alert and awake,” maintained a proud Unisa staffer, who is obviously also a firm believer in our hard-won freedom.
A nuisance
‘Three suspects will appear at the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court soon on charges of armed robbery and attempted murder,” said one of this week’s numerous messages to the Dorsbult that arrive courtesy of the police’s hard-working Carrier Pigeon Unit.
The regulars raised their glasses to the meisies en manne in blue, until someone noticed the next sentence: ”A zero tolerance approach has been adopted towards all forms of crime, especially the aggravating ones.” Have the police quietly instituted a new hierarchy of crime, ranging perhaps from Mildly Irritating through Averagely Inconvenient all the way to the offences that receive automatic life sentences, Incredibly Annoying?
Gender jinks
‘We do drink, but we drink pretty things,” a newly emboldened Dorsbult hackette announced this week. The Dorsbult is, of course, under new management, and the manne have been moping over their mampoer in the face of clouds of powdery proposals from the meisies for a total overhaul. These range from the name (Dorsbult Cocktail Lounge: out go Klippies and coke, in come daiquiris), decor (cerise), and facilities (aromatherapy and foot massages instead of peanuts and pool tables).
The Oom was therefore alarmed to see onse Ernie Els pronouncing in this rag last week on women playing golf: ”I don’t think it is the natural thing to do. I don’t think there is much future for it. How many girls are going to be good enough to play?” Krisjan draws on centuries of his tribe’s experience in handling wounded lionesses and the like when he offers the Big Cheesy a kindly word of avuncular advice: Walk softly and carry a moeruva knobkerrie, broer.