Golden Boy loses his shine
An audit has revealed that South Africa’s goldmines are 95% exhausted and that the gold mining industry has just a few years left. Meanwhile Julius Malema has announced that he no longer wants mines nationalised and is instead calling for the nationalising of “stuff that will still be there” when he is President. Malema described the audit as a minor setback but conceded that the ANCYL would now have to draw up a new budget for the next five years as it could no longer base its calculations on being given R400-trillion in gold ingots.
A taste of the lash
President Jacob Zuma has confirmed that he will personally hold all incompetent or corrupt public servants accountable, failing which he will just hold them. According to Presidency spokesman Bikiniwax Mthembu the President had vowed to “crack the whip”. “And that’s just what he gets up to in the wee hours in the Presidential honeymoon suite,” added Mthembu. “Just imagine what he is capable of once he sponges off the honey, peels off the latex, gets dressed and goes to work.”
Money for nothing
Former Vodacom boss Alan Knott-Craig, who gets R1-million a month for doing nothing, has outraged senior government officials who only get R50 000 a month for doing nothing. “This is an outrage!” said one insider, who has been on her lunch-break since 2002. “Why does he get so much more than us when we do the same amount of work?” She vowed to act “at once”, probably in 2015.
Smash hit
The Sunday Times reported on the weekend that kwaito megastar Mandoza was injured “when his car smashed into a palm tree”. It is unclear whether or not Mandoza was driving but police have confirmed that they have questioned the car and that it insists it was simply obeying instructions from the driver. “My client did not smash into a palm tree,” said the car’s lawyer. “The chop behind the wheel did. We demand justice.” He added that he hoped Judge Motata would not be trying the case as he had had “a bad experience being ambushed by a racist vibrocrete wall”.
Dialectical dialect
In a passionate defence of President Zuma’s claims on job creation, Deputy Police Minister Fikile Mbalula told local media, “We said what was feasible, that we are going to do, but our plans in relation to that, you must understand this in a dialectical form.” Asked whether the million people who lost their jobs last year would also understand this in a dialectical form, Mbalula explained that the poor don’t need to understand anything except how to make an X next to the letters A, N and C. “Leave the thinking up to me,” he said.
Under cover of darkness
Asked why President Jacob Zuma broke with tradition and gave his State of the Nation speech in the evening, the Presidency explained that Zuma does his best work at night. The speech has been widely praised for its comedic value, although pundits agree with Zuma that the country is surprisingly fertile, pregnant with possibility, and that 2010 would be a year of painful labour and new birth.
We love you, Mideeber!
White people marked the 20th anniversary of the release of Nelson Mandela last week by reinventing themselves as retrospective activists. According to a snap poll 146% of white people said that they had always been 172% against the imprisonment of Mandela. Zara LeFevre-Blister of Constantia said that 11 February 1990 had changed her world forever. “On that day I stopped calling my gardener ‘boy’ and asked him is name,” she said. “But it was like really complicated with clicks and stuff, so I’ve called him John ever since.”