It was noble of Visdorp mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo to tell last week’s full council meeting that urgent steps must be taken to end racism and intolerance; but things went pear-shaped when she started bemoaning the shortage of engineers in the OR Tambo municipality. This district, she said, has only one engineer “and he is not even South African”. Clearly the good mayor has forgotten about one Blackman Ngoro, an engineer of sorts, who wasn’t South African either.
Roll the dice
Vrot Snoek burst into the Dorsbult Bar this week, dressed in a tuxedo and brandishing a cocktail shaker, yelling that he had passed the Ministry of Intelligence’s “spycraft” exam. Once the manne had calmed him down and persuaded him that the “double-o” code didn’t mean “licensed to drive a combine harvester”, they discovered he had visited the website of South Africa’s spook agency, and had found a link called “Test your spycraft”. Impressed, Lemmer logged on to www.intelligence.co.za, only to find that the link took him to a game of snakes and ladders, each snake headed with words like “sabotage”, “terrorism” and “WMD proliferation”, and each ladder labelled “partnership”, “coordination” and so on. Considering the state of the NIA, Lemmer wonders whether it might not be a good idea to make this game mandatory for all employees, to help them keep their eye on the ball.
What’s in a name?
The manne heard this week about a black economic empowerment deal that was set up between two parties who pretty much summed it all up: a venture in “gaming tourism” in Limpopo was signed Xhoisan X and Boer Coetzee. Lemmer isn’t sure if this is Xhoisan “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer” X, but if it is, one assumes Coetzee is not the sort to take death threats personally.