Hlaudi too close to the sun
ONCE upon a time, there was a Greek guy called Icarus, who was trying to flee certain death on Crete.
His dad, Daedalus, made him a set of wings, with glued-together birds’ feathers. He flapped his arms and soared into the sky.
His freedom was short-lived, because he ignored his dad’s injunction not to fly too high.
Instead, intoxicated by his godlike powers, he soared too close to the sun, melted the glue that held his feathers and, with the new aerodynamics of a brick, plunged thousands of metres to his death in the sea below.
Today, we remember Icarus as a salutary reminder of what happens to those whose overweening arrogance leads to their downfall.
Unsurprisingly for someone who has neither a degree in aerodynamics nor a matric certificate, the story – and its underlying caveat – appear heroically lost to Hlaudi Motsoeneng, the Attila the Hun of Auckland Park.
He’s suspended at the moment after the Western Cape High Court ruled that he be barred from entering the building and appear before another SABC disciplinary hearing, after the broadcaster promptly appointed him group executive of public affairs once the Supreme Court of Appeal found him unfit to be chief operating officer.
The fate appears to hold no fears for the irrepressible Motsoeneng, in fact it excites him.
He’s a man who now refers to himself in the third person, much like Julius Caesar in the Asterix comics.
This week he held what seemed to be a pre-emptive press conference, even though no date has been set for it.
It was more a post-Paschal religious revival than a press conference, with Hlaudi as the Second Coming, dispensing wisdom and beatitudes as befits a man who almost ruined the SABC with his Goebbels-like clamp on opinion and reporting, in favour of his fervent “good news” gospel.
His fatwa on local content did the rest, plunging the broadcaster into near SAA-like financial incontinence as advertisers fled lemming-like for the doors and almost muzzling the Bollywood-dependent Radio Lotus.
Now though, we are told, the eyries of Auckland Park no longer hold any allure, instead it’s to the Union Buildings that his messianic gaze has fallen.
Keeping to his faithful role of being His Master’s Voice, his entertaining though pointless press conference held faithfully to the current holy writ: Jacob Zuma must finish his term, to be succeeded by his former wife Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma and then – presumably Hlaudi himself, completing what would be an unlikely trinity of Father, divorced wife and unholy terror.
It’s simple, he said, his 20-million followers will make it happen. Successive ministers of finance will have been kicking themselves at not getting Motsoeneng to encourage them to pay their TV licences.
Hlaudi has never needed public support though, as erstwhile communications minister Faith Muthambi once let slip: “uBaba uyamthanda” (father loves him) in an unsubtle hint to just how someone so obviously – and dangerously – unsuitable for such an important role could ever have wangled his way to the top of the corporation and then mounted such an indefatigable defence to stay there, as the mobs of aggrieved citizenry clambered at the very gates.
The glue that holds Hlaudi’s wings is softening though. South Africa in 2017 is a far different place.
He’s about to find out just how much.