BYE-BYE BATHABILE
Poor Cyril — he wins the presidency, but a bunch of deadbeats are part of the package. He needs to chill far, far away, with whales for company
Iknow many readers are sitting at their favourite restaurants banging on about how Julius Malema is going for a piece of land here, there and everywhere. Some are wringing their hands in despair: “He is turning us into Zimbabwe!”
Others are more sanguine: “Pass the wine, old chap. Make sure it’s chilled to just the right temperature, please. Oh, is it 5 pm already? Funny how long these lunches take.”
I am with the second reader. We have been here before. Remember when the sky was falling back in the 1990s because Bantustan leaders wouldn’t join in with the rest of SA, Eugene Terre’blanche was going to start his own volkstaat, and the
PAC was going to murder whites in their sleep? Relax.
I am vaguely interested in the land issue. But I am far more interested in the cabinet announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa last week. Now that’s a man who needs a drink or two. I mean, have you seen just how many of the people who want to stab him in the back he has amassed around him?
It tells you just how rotten Jacob Zuma’s cabinet was that even after Ramaphosa’s wholesale clean-out there are still so many shockingly bad ministers left. Mosebenzi Zwane, a man so intellectually challenged that he poses a danger to humanity, was fired. So was the inept David Des van Rooyen. So was the comatose Lynne Brown.
Faith Muthambi, who used to leak news about cabinet resolutions to the Guptas, also got the old heave-ho.
Yet Ramaphosa still has the fantastically incompetent Bathabile Dlamini in his cabinet. Oh, and Malusi Gigaba is still around. You will remember that on his watch the Guptas got to call the shots at home affairs. Nomvula Mokonyane, who once said the rand can collapse all it likes and “we will pick it up”, is also still your cabinet member.
Poor Cyril. Surrounded by snakes. I wish him luck. Never in our 24-year history has a leader been surrounded and burdened by so much mediocrity.
Maybe he should take a holiday. I know he has been exhorting the world to come here, take the sun, and spend their cash. But seeing as there is no water in Cape Town, maybe, in the meantime, he should visit Los Angeles, which is finally getting some rain after its own devastating drought. Like Cape Town, LA is a foodie paradise. Expensive, affordable, healthy, faddish, inventive — it’s all there.
So off we went to Malibu Farm Café & Restaurant — a quaint and very popular breakfast and lunch venue out on the pier where you can have a wholesome, locally sourced breakfast or lunch cocktails while taking in the immense Pacific. Sometimes you can see whales and dolphins gambolling out at sea. It’s packed and you may have to wait a bit for a table.
This is actually two beautifully built restaurants (the owner is Swedish, which you can tell by the clean lines of the buildings and by some of the dishes) — a restaurant with a full menu at the beginning of the pier and a café right on the water. The food is just delicious. My daughter’s root beer and fish tacos were excellent, my grass-fed burger (this is America, I just had to have one) was scrumptious and the salmon was outstanding.
I was surrounded by friends and loved ones and I was far, far away from Bathabile Dlamini. Ramaphosa really should consider taking a break from her. It will do him good.
It tells you just how rotten Jacob Zuma’s cabinet was that there are still so many shockingly bad ministers left
Malibu Farm Café ★★★★
23000 Pacific Coast Highway, Los Angeles, US Tel: +1 (310) 456-1112
★★★★★ Cyril Ramaphosa ★★★★ Excellent ★★★ Good ★★ Poor ★ Bathabile Dlamini