Where rubber ducky hits the road for Mguptama
THE commander of the pseudorevolutionary wing of the Saxonwold Empire, Andile Mngxitama, wrote a long letter to his ex-comrade, the commander-in-chief of the Red Berets, begging him for a debate on the latter’s love for Louis Vuitton and his flirtation with the Blue Wave party.
But Juju just doesn’t play in Mngxitama’s junior league any more and so it fell to one of his make-believe generals, Floyd Shivambu, to respond.
“Mguptama,” Shivambu wrote of the Gupta lackey, “must get [at least] 10% of the vote the EFF received under CIC @Julius-Malema, then bath & maybe we can send someone for the debate.”
Mngxitama is probably waiting on Bell Pottinger for a response.
Retail of two cities
DESPITE his legendary penchant for European designer clothing labels, the self-styled CIC is not fond of shopping malls in townships.
At a June 16 rally, he said those who wanted shopping malls should not support the EFF as it would build only factories in townships.
Which sounds a lot like the “border industries” policy of apartheid oberführer Hendrik Verwoerd: build the malls in the suburbs and force the township dwellers to make the suburbanites rich.
Giving in to temptation
THE Desperate Alliance may have asked its most difficult member to limit her tweeting to provincial issues, but on Thursday GodZille was already at it again, while visiting fire victims in Knysna in the Eden district municipality.
Walking with the Nkandla Crooner, that busy Twitter finger tweeted: “At a personal level, the Prez is empathetic and charming. As we walked through the ash and ruins he asked me how I was bearing up personally.”
To which the first reply, quick as a flash, from one @Sir X, was: “So was the Serpent in the Garden of Eden.”
Weekend specials
THURSDAY-afternoon sittings of the house are usually an empty affair because many people have skipped the Cape for “constituency work”.
The Thursday before a long weekend is especially dire — leaving the ANC unable to pass the Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill this week. ANC chief whip Jackson Mthembu had to postpone the vote.
The DA’s Mike Waters pointed out that despite South Africa having the second-largest cabinet in the world, there was only one minister in the house. Hogarth did not need to look at his TV to know that minister would be Naledi Pandor, the head girl of parliament known for her near-perfect attendance record and her stickler-for-the-rules attitude.
Mthembu stammered that there were in fact two ministers and three deputies present.
Hogarth does not need to have passed matric maths to know that five out of 74 ministers and deputy ministers, at less than 10%, could be considered a fail.
Moving parliament up north may help with this sort of thing, but in the meantime, Hogarth would like to suggest that Thursday-afternoon sittings be conducted in the Cape Town airport Slow Lounge.
League of their own
THE ANC kindergarten held a briefing the other day to explain its choice of Mama Afrika, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, as its preferred presidential candidate ahead of McBuffalo.
Hogarth could not help but notice that at some point during the briefing, the kindergarten’s Njabulo Nzuza — known as Big Nuz — forgot his lines and kept telling the media that they would nominate Dlamini-Zuma as “president of the ANC Youth League”.
Well, if an “old youth” like the league’s current president Collen “Oros” Maine can do it, what’s to stop Mama Afrika, Big Nuz seems to be thinking.
You could all chip in
IT is Father’s Day and Hogarth would like to make a special request to Duduzane, Duduzile, Edward, Gugu or any of the rest of the First Family’s children to buy Baba a gift he actually needs. (And what’s the use of expensive watches when he continues to be late for every engagement — be it public or private?) Hogarth suggests you get him a book. It might save all of us from having to endure his rather excited renditions of the same lines, over and over again, from Macbeth.
How about David Hawkins’s Letting Go: The Pathway to Surrender?