According to Visdorp mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo, this week’s taxpayer-funded R200 000 makietie for women in the city’s administration was all about empowering the fairer sex. Empowerment is a crummy job but someone’s got to do it, and luckily our Nomaindia’s been empowering people for years. Golf estate developers, beach–property moguls, you name it, she’s there, empowering up a storm. Aluta continua.
No laughing matter
Speaking of Mfeketo the Liberator of Public Funds, the skandaal over her recently fired sociological adviser Blackman Ngoro might be abating, but its ripples aren’t. Discussing the coloured backlash against Ngoro in Cape Town, SABC anchorwoman Lerato Mbele was told by a journalist that Visdorp tabloids had denounced the loony adviser with a resounding ”Jou ma se”. Now Lemmer can remember Riaan Cruywagen losing it once or twice back in the 1980s, but Lerato’s off-camera hysterics (heard as dimly muffled shrieks and snorts, as the journalist plunged gamely on) made Riaan seem poker-faced in comparison. Tears streaming and snot-bubbles imminent, Mbele cut away for a blessed ad-break, and when we returned, the inscrutable smile of Morafe Tabane had taken her place …
Parallel universe parking
SABC3 news reader Joanne Joseph was full of Women’s Day beans on Tuesday as the space shuttle Discovery landed in California, its second-choice landing site after bad weather prevented a Florida descent. ”A perfect landing!” announced Joanne. ”Who says women can’t drive?” Ja, grumbled Vrot Snoek (who was sore because Mrs Snoek had told him to make his own bloody lunch for a change), she might be flying a spaceship, but she still overshot her parking bay by 2 000 miles …
0860-Neanderthal
Having once been choked unconscious by a 60kg gender studies researcher, Lemmer chose to keep tjoepstil this year over his worries about giving a Day to women, thereby automatically equating them with the Easter Bunny and the Colour Blind and the Slightly Hard of Hearing, and all the other forgotten minorities that get a Day. But clearly there was no such tokenism at e.tv on Tuesday night. True, the screening of Once Were Warriors (an orgy of wife–beating and depraved masculinity) had Lemmer worrying about patronising special treatment, but he was quickly reassured that the broadcaster was intent on treating women exactly as it always did, as it managed to squeeze in at least two adverts for cellphone porn and late-night skin-fliks during the film’s dénouement. Way to go, okes. Next stop: the 15th century.