Lemmer learned this week that some of Dorsbult’s less transformed senior citizens have been taking great solace in the online writing of Fikile Beebopaloola, the President and literary über-kahuna of the African National Congress Youth League. It’s rare, one told Oom Krisjan, to come across real paranoia in an overwhelmingly dominant political party: ah, she sighed, just like the good old 1980s. This week, instead of deliciously nostalgic racial politics, they got the real deal: Total Onslaught. If sewage leaking into a borehole in Delmas was ”the sole cause” of the typhoid outbreak, mused Fikile, ”then all efforts must be focused on remedying this malice.” Lemmer can only assume this was a veiled allusion to the overwhelming evidence, caught on ANCYL Box Brownies, that it was Tony Leon and Douglas Gibson poeping down a well that caused the outbreak. The alternative is too loopy to comprehend. After all, even Vorster and PW never went as far as seeing demonic, moustache-twirling malice in a piece of poo.
A is for Absent
A National Framework for Teacher Education in South Africa, a report produced by a ministerial committee on teacher education, recommends that we start talking about ”teachers” again instead of ”educators”, to ”refocus” the system on classroom face-time. This is jolly important stuff — the name change is the first of the report’s recommendations — but Oom Krisjan wants to know this: given the wobbly condition and qualifications of thousands of ”educators”, and given the new emphasis on distinguishing teachers from administrators, surely it’s time for more accurate and inclusive titles? Lemmer moots a sliding scale, starting at ”underpaid mentor-saint” and rapidly spiraling down to ”barely literate binge-drinking absentee lecher”.
Is there a speaker in the house?
After the recent stampede in Parliament — ”floor-crossing” is too refined a phrase to describe the movement of pigs towards a trough — it seemed a formal roll- call was in order. A new edition of the Government Gazette (called State of Parties Represented in the National Assembly as at 16 September 2005) duly listed all the names of MPs; including, oddly enough, one Frene Noshir Ginwala. Now Lemmer could be wrong, but didn’t the Silver Fox decline the offer of a backbench in 2004? And if she’s been on their books for 18 months, has she been earning a salary, and if so, is the Ginwala cheque account about to have just under R1 million withdrawn by a short-changed State? Order indeed.