Why the president reels in award for fishy business

The competition for the most bizarre public statements made during President Cyril Ramaphosa’s first 100 days in office has been hotly contested, as evidenced by the finalists’ top-rated blows to punchdrunk South Africans lurching into the next era of perplexity.

To recap, the criteria designed by an element of the Upper Jukskei Flyfishing Collective are, in diminishing weighting, shrinking fishing grounds, subterfuge and denial.

To win, a candidate’s statement must demonstrate the highest degree of effect in each of the categories.

As always, the private sector has made a valiant effort, praise the dream of a free market.

Consider, for instance, the submission to communications regulator Icasa by MultiChoice CEO Calvo Mawela over the unfairness of unregulated competition from nonbroadcast streamers such as Netflix, followed by this: “If you keep on trying to regulate us more and more, they are going to destroy the TV industry overall.”

MultiChoice and Mawela deserve a Commended Award (third place, actually) for making their bizarre statement while inadequately covering fishing, preaching regulation while condemning it, and denying that a loop of repeat programmes is destroying its business.

MultiChoice would have been a contender for runner-up had it kept its faith in Gupta-TV.

But that’s that for the private sector. Steinhoff’s efforts came before Ramaphosa took office.

The proud runner-up, oddly enough, is the Department of Environmental Affairs for including trout as an invasive species while contradicting its definition under the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act.

This effort to list trout by singling out the species for risk assessment while 559 other listed invasive species escape such torment is bizarre.

The department did well, too, by attempting to prove its assumptions about trout by citing its assumptions about trout. This fallacy deserves high praise alongside its obtuse denial of the trout value chain.

Now to the winner, and democratic SA’s fifth president, the Honourable Cyril Ramaphosa who, it must be said, gave himself an advantage by submitting multiple entries.

A notable contender is his admiration for China’s dictator, Deng Xiaoping. He said at the same occasion just how much he had learnt from former president Nelson Mandela, who “was not dictatorial”.

The best entry by an expropriated country mile is, however, the president’s faint praise of the media: “Many of you had already raised a number of issues on a piecemeal basis … but when you finally prised open the whole thing, it became patently clear that we were dealing with a much bigger problem than we had ever imagined.”

First, as subterfuge goes, there are few statements as devastating as faint praise. This applies especially to journalists for whom the overinflated ego is an occupational hazard. And it’s clever, too. In this way, Ramaphosa hopes to plausibly deny culpability as an accessory before, during or after the fact of state capture.

It means he does not have to be overly concerned about prosecuting the perpetrators of the nearly forgotten arms deal that doomed the new SA before it properly got under way. It means also that just about anything rotten in the government and the stateowned entities does not exist unless it has been Gupta-linked.

Consider the shenanigans at the Airports Company SA (Acsa). The president’s minion, Transport Minister Blade Nzimande, has yet to give reasons for not taking disciplinary action against Acsa CEO Bongani Maseko, who has so many credible charges against him that several lawyers have started drooling. Now Nzimande has extended Maseko’s tenure for six months, yet Ramaphosa has not said a word about such an obvious instance of maladministration.

Not a Gupta in sight, as the environmental affairs department ignores the coal mining threat in Mpumalanga, and the chaos at the Department of Water and Sanitation is swept under the carpet as matters that occurred when he was a mere deputy to Jacob Zuma.

What a win that was, considering the high standard and volume of entries. Now the nation knows that what lies ahead is denial, subterfuge and shrinking fishing grounds.