POLITICS IS THIRSTY WORK
SOLLY, a former colleague of mine, called the other day to ask whether I had noticed how much water is consumed by our politicians.
I know we Cape Town folk are sensitive about water wastage, but I hadn’t noticed any particular differences between the water consumption of politicians and normal people.
“Next time you watch television,” Solly said, “take a look at the scenes of any political meeting or commission of enquiry or official investigation and see how many bottles of water there are on the tables in front of the members.
“Usually there are two bottles for each member of the group. From time to time they pour some into a glass and take a sip. Two bottles each, they get, and it isn’t just tap water. No, they get commercially bottled water and it doesn’t come cheap.”
Solly wanted to know who supplied all that water and at what cost to us taxpayers. Maybe he has a point. At any time in this convoluted country of ours there must be a dozen or so official commissions in session, as well as all nine of our provincial governments and the national government departments in Cape Town and Pretoria. It all adds up to several million litres of bottled water a day.
Being a normally suspicious South African, Solly wonders whether all that water is supplied by some politician’s second wife’s oldest son by a previous marriage, who is the director of a water bottling company with a lucrative contract signed by the head of the Department of Water Affairs in his Gucci briefcase. Public expenditure is not all about vast nuclear power deals or billion-rand water schemes.
Sometimes there are fortunes spent on little details like paper clips or rubber bands. Or bottled water. And because it trickles out of our wallets a few cents at a time we tend not to notice it.
Banks rip us off like that all the time in the form of hidden charges for overdraft facilities we didn’t ask for and never use.
Our cellphone providers simply write off gigs of data we paid for and haven’t used by the end of each month. If we complain we are told we agreed to accept that when we signed the contract. We are used to being cheated. It’s just a part of normal life.
Of course politicians need two bottles of water for every meeting they attend. Politics is thirsty work and we wouldn’t want to call a halt to the vital work of an important commission of inquiry while somebody is sent out for a second bottle of water. Like all animals, politicians need regular watering. Last Laugh
A keen golfer’s wife asked him one day: “Why don’t you play golf with Eddie any more? You used to play together regularly.”
“Huh!” said the husband. “Would you play with somebody who cheats on his score card and moves the ball when he thinks you’re not looking?”
“No, I suppose not,” said his wife.
“Well, neither will Eddie.”