Apart from taking a flame-thrower to a cash-in-transit van, there are only a few truly effective ways of wasting money. Investing in the Sudan is one. Alternatively, one can fund organisations trying to bring democracy to Lesotho. Or organisations trying to bring the 16th century to Lesotho. Or the wheel. Or fire.
Of course you could buy Clifton chalets for Zimbabwe’s senior ministers, but that’s what the Zimbabwean Reserve Bank is for and one doesn’t want to tread on toes.
Yes, making money disappear is all in a day’s work for Sicilian cement exporters or Angolan Treasury officials, but for the layman, presented with 450 000 neatly pressed R200 notes, it’s a daunting task.
Thank heavens, then, for the trained professionals on show this week in Pretoria, where our most incontinent squanderers gathered for an unrivalled display of fiscal profligacy to celebrate the final triumph of the people over the blue hair of Frene Ginwala.
It was R90-million well-spent though, and it confirmed that when one is tired of traditional dancing, performed by wildly uncoordinated and malnourished people who look as if they’re connected by the crotch to a generator, one is tired of life.
It was also a resounding endorsement of the benefits of Nepad, or as Western donor nations know it, Kneepad; and the Soweto String Quartet, enthusiastic as Josef Mengele, reminded the cynics that with a dream and song in his heart any township kid can one day wear a zebra-print blazer and play paint-by-numbers classics for crowds of Germans who clap and throw bananas and nuts.
But amid all the vibrancy of the week, as the government jubilantly gave the finger to the country’s poor, the media’s retrospectives were strangely incomplete. Political flashbacks there were aplenty (‘Three cheers for Madiba and that other one, the one with the pipe”) and even the state of our culture got a column or two, pundits agreeing that it’s been downhill since Onse Mimi was the Queen of the Night. But not a peep about sport.
Nothing about why Sam Ramsamy still has a job at the National Olympic Committee when the only gold adorning his administration is holding together rotten bicuspids. Nothing about why Bafana Bafana is slightly less competitive than the social soccer team of the Lutheran Sisters of Mercy on Guam. Nothing about the Springbok, kept alive by corporate nebbishes to carve fresh steaks off its haunches when they’re entertaining obese guests at their Mpumalanga log-bars.
Perhaps, where the sports ministry has been concerned, it’s a case of the less said the better. Former minister Steve Tshwete was most famous for getting snot on Peter Kirsten’s shirt at the 1992 Cricket World Cup; Ngconde Balfour will be remembered for questioning the existence of Jacques Kallis while at the same time entertaining the curious view that South African football just needed a stern talking-to, rather than a raid by the Scorpions with stun-guns sparkling gaily in the dark corridors of Safa.
As pole-vaulter Ockert Brits proved over and over again, usually a fraction prematurely, what goes up must come down, and somehow our highlights of the last decade just didn’t stay high. Francois Pienaar moved to England with a lifetime supply of Lays and a restraining order against Louis Luyt. James Small went into business with a pixie who makes tie-dyed rags and awful post-adolescent art. Josiah Tugwane won Olympic gold and went back to living in a shack. Hansie Cronje opened his abridged Bible and found that avarice, pride and wrath had been declassified as deadly sins and reconstituted as sound business practice. Wayne Ferreira proved more adept at slamming his racquet into tennis courts than into cross-court winners. And Ockert, well, couldn’t get his leg over any more.
Of course there are blessings we should count. We’ve stopped bleeding from our ears since Elana Meyer called it a day and stopped talking into microphones. And Naas Botha has slowly been taught to speak, using finger-puppets and audiotapes of Hugh Grant reading Jane Austen novels.
But sport has made one genuinely important contribution to our democracy over the past 10 years. Without it, a great many white South Africans would still not know the words to our national anthem. And so, my fellow citizens, join me in singing the first verse to celebrate the unifying power of sport:
‘Nkosi sickle Ellie Africa. My loo pack a meat-saw, ponder lie your. Yes well, lemme tell you, saw Yethu. Nkosi, sickle Ellie. Tina, loo supple lie your.”