/ 3 January 2013

Not the M&G: Letter from the president

VIDEO M&G's Rapule Tabane analyses President Zuma's victory at Mangaung
VIDEO M&G's Rapule Tabane analyses President Zuma's victory at Mangaung

Comrades, citizens, wives, future wives, ladies, gentlemen, boys, girls, cats, dogs, blacks, whites, Zulus, non-Zulus, heterosexuals, non-heterosexuals and all the other strictly policed dichotomies that this country has come to symbolise. Good day.

As I look out of my bulletproof window, across my waterproof lawn and away over the criticism-proof fence of my modest homestead, I remember the patriotic words of John F Kennedy, who said: "Ask not. What your country can do for you, ask. What you can do for your country?" Wise, beautiful words. But my favourite part is "Ask not". Asking questions only leads to heartache and defeatism. Let us instead join hands, rejecting the counterrevolutionary obsession with checks and balances, accounts and ledgers, paper trails and Parliamentary question times, and march, with our hearts open and our eyes shut, into a glorious future of ubuntu and other words that we dust off whenever we need you to keep the tax revenue pumping.

Please do not try to imagine this future. Thinking for yourselves can cause a variety of injuries, which is why this administration strongly discourages critical thinking in all its forms. It's called Critical Care for a reason, people. Instead, allow me to reveal our plans for 2013.

In this momentous year, the 47 150th year since the founding of the ANC, we vow to:

  • End poverty. We have a plan, called Our Big Plan, that involves moving money clockwise round the economy instead of anticlockwise. Schabir says it can't fail. But if it does, it's because you weren't loyal enough.
  • Cure all diseases. We will do this by injecting you with undiluted ubuntu, straight into your eyeball.
  • End racism. We will root out all racists, possibly using some sort of pencil test or skull-measuring callipers, and banish them.
  • Save our people from the satanic onslaught of the Swart en Wit Gevaar, namely, newsprint. We have some ideas on how to do this, but they're about to be classified. Like pretty much everything else over the next five years.
  • Dear citizens, let us embrace our destiny in 2013. In the words of Franklin D Roosevelt, we have nothing to fear but the Public Protector.

Yours in clover,

The President