Only a few weeks into the new year and already three contenders for the prestigious 2006 Gobbledegook of the Year Awards (Goya) have published their submissions. Since Goya’s inception a few years ago, the level of incoherent, garbled, and generally incomprehensible public utterances and publications has risen to a bewildering degree. The following three January examples show how brilliantly the art of communicative befuddlement has been developed and refined by our public figures. If these are anything to go by, this year’s will be a bumper crop.
Let us begin with the best of the three. This murky evacuation takes the lead by virtue of being almost utterly without meaning, a most commendable virtue of gobbledegook at a near-virtuoso level. It came from David Harrison, CEO of loveLife, in conversation with Chris Barron of the Sunday Times. As an obituarist, Barron is paid to discuss dead things, so in conversation with the chief apologist for the loveLife corpse, he was on familiar ground. Harrison was being asked about the recent decision by the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria to curtail funding of loveLife on the grounds that loveLife isn’t and hasn’t been doing what it promised to do, but nonetheless has managed to spend tankerloads of money not doing so. Chris Barron offered the following statement to David Harrison: ‘The most important target, it seems to me, is to cut down the incidence of HIV, which has not happened.†In response, Harrison immediately engulfed Barron in a warm flush of opacity.
‘Clearly. But even the Global Fund recognises that it is very difficult to link a single programme within a much broader comprehensive response to a specific outcome, and that’s the reason why there are intermediary indicators of what are regarded as key measures towards that goal. And those indicators were the indicators that we indeed did meet. You can’t only look at the bald national prevalence figures, you’ve got to dig a little deeper. And when you do, you see there are very encouraging signs of things moving in a positive direction.â€
Such a level of shameless crap demands instant admiration. Harrison’s slop about ‘bald national prevalence†is sui generis, it will make gobbledegook aficionados drool. You get a similar feeling, of almost personal satisfaction, when you watch Mark Boucher slap the Aussie bowlers in their cocky faces. But then Harrison is head of an organisation which has a history of the extravagant. We all remember with envy the celebrity-bedecked opening ceremony to the 2000 Durban Aids Conference. A glitzy faux Hollywood showbiz spectacular; a hideous intensity of bad taste lasting three hours. All this was brought in by loveLife at the bargain-basement cost of a mere 10-million smackers. What is surprising is that the Global Fund didn’t muffle the loveLife valves the very next day.
The second in the early Goya contenders has been no less a figure than the African National Congress’s deputy secretary, Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele. She popped up on an e.tv news bulletin to explain why the ANC finds it difficult to criticise Zimbabwe for human rights violations. e.tv gave us but a snatch of what was probably a much more satisfying greater confusion.
‘So it is difficult for me to say there are violations of human rights because we have put Zimbabweans under siege by not allowing them that transformatory process which we allowed ourselves to have before we went to the World Trade Talks.â€
To make so little sense in so few words is, of itself, an art. Less is less? What makes Mthembi-Mahanyele’s statement so beguiling are the intriguing interpretations that can be awarded to both its contradictions and its surprise ending. This is not David Harrison-style meaningless twaddle. This is full of meaning, awash with jeopardy. You are left wondering what mystic Zimbabwean ‘transformatory†process needs to be ANC-authorised so as to allow Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF goons yet more time to beat the living shit out of the country and its people? The only transformation currently under way in Zimbabwe is its precipitate metamorphosis from what it was into a basket full of political crazies. While this atrophy takes place, it would appear that the deputy secretary of the ANC believes that even the most nominal moral reservations about human rights violations have to be suspended.
The third early Goya contestant — already heading up the mephitic pomposity section — is one Dr Baba Shaik of the North West legislature. Shaik last week gave vent to a flow of subliterate prolixity on the subject of Harry Charlton, ex-chief financial officer of Parliament. Describing Charlton as a ‘chatted†accountant, Shaik thundered on: ‘The continued employment of the employee would coil mistrust, dishonesty, nefarious intent and above all chaos will reign [sic] into the management of Parliament affairs.†As the Sunday Times‘s Hogarth commented, ‘If you are going to be bombastic … do it with flawless grammar and punctuation. It stings that little bit more.â€
A set of contenders for the Group Gobbledegook Goya Award will be the verbose coterie of spokesfolk making excuses about our deputy president having sopped up something between R400 000 and R700 000 on her holiday trip to the United Arab Emirates. When it comes to gobble-degook, that’s been aplenty.