/ 18 December 2007

Alert! We’re going manual!

Monday, 17 December

What a day, dear diary, what a day! Finally got the piece of plastic which allows me into the conference!

They said it was all my fault ‘cos I kept asking for a credit card — credit card, accreditation card, what’s the big Black Economic Empowerment deal? Even Comrade Thabo was saying on Monday that in the nu-ANC, they’re interchangeable.

Anyhow, I hot-tailed over to the network lounge faster than an Aunt Mathilda screeching towards his first Botox session the morning after his 50th.

Almost mucked up my Christian Louboutin stilettos by gouging the eyeball of some peasant asleep outside her mielie-shack at the entrance of the University of Limpopo. With all the police and barbed wire deployed around the campus, you’d think the ruling party would have had the streets swept as well! It’s not like she was getting any business.

Was pretty quiet at the networking lounge. I couldn’t get a signal. Their system must have been down. No Mo Shaik, no Vivian Reddy, not even a wannabe bottled-water tycoon hanging out in the toilet with a purifier. It was probably too early in the day for people to rouse from Johnny Walker Blue-induced slumber.

Did bump into Renier Schoeman, chief facilitator of the ANC’s Progressive Business Forum, though. Which is a bit like expecting veal and getting served an overdone Doc Martin.

Aside from getting the ANC to slip into something a little more comfortable for Big Business, he’s also flogging DVDs of previous ANC and ANC Youth League Conferences. Considering the shafting that chairperson Mosiuoa Lekota got on Monday, I think the 52nd National Conference’s DVD will definitely be a top-shelf affair.

Hopefully they’re not going to title it Polokwane Cluster Shag 2007, because both Terror and Thabo appear to be getting it from all sides at the moment.

Poor TM, the lonely fellow’s name was booed every time it was mentioned this morning — even when the representative from the Palestinian Liberation Organisation greeted him before presenting a message of support on behalf of Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas.

Made sense for the security to chuck out media then. So undignified, really.

It seems a chiding from Kgalema Motlanthe and Mendi Msimang hasn’t been heeded, so maybe Smutty Ngonyama and Jeff Radebe’s attempt to ‘remind comrades” that this sort of behaviour is ‘completely foreign to the ANC culture” will work tomorrow. Probably not.

En route home one of the comrades whispered that the conference had decided to ‘go manual”. I mumbled something about not realising the party was as dedicated to masturbation as it is to creating ‘a better life for all”. The comrade said something about the voting process, but by then the light-bulb came on: need to get more involved in the party’s election manifesto. I can deliver more than just hand-jobs to the masses!