Councillors must not raise a stink, says Zuma

PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma should be commended for urging ANC councillors to bone up on personal hygiene and give themselves a good scrubbing now and then.

Addressing supporters in Zulu at Mombela Stadium in Mpumalanga earlier this week, the president was quoted as saying, “We want councillors who are like charmers... Our councillors must also be clean, take a bath and not be dirty. You must be loved by the people.”

So spoke a man known to have a shower on occasion. But it is a very good idea, even during a drought. No one likes a stinky person – especially one appointed to serve the public. Municipal meetings would be intolerable, what with officials keeping a considerable distance from one another. The Mahogany Ridge’s battered and well-thumbed copy of JP Donleavy’s The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners is unambiguously blunt in this regard:

“The worst fumes are carried in continually worn undergarments which absorb rancidities from the vaporous areas under the arms and between the legs. In warm enclosed places these yeasty gases finally rise up through the rest of the clothing. However one can by prolonged fermentation carefully cultivate an acceptable odour out of one’s overall fulsomeness which resembles the not unpleasant smell of new mown hay.

“But, except to maybe some insanely deprived and perverted yokel, a stranger’s reeking armpit is usually not a source of pleasure to another.”

Do the armpits particularly reek in Mpumalanga? Why did the president choose that province to deliver this message? And why would he, a teetotaller, urge supporters to “brew alcohol, I’m coming for celebrations” if the ANC won the province with 90 percent of the vote in the local elections?

These are troubling questions that may have to be dealt with on another occasion. Right now, let’s concentrate on the suggestion that councillors be “charmers”. No one likes a brownnoser. Their behaviour often brings out the worst in people rather than the best, although sometimes it does come as a relief to meet outrageous and profligate sycophants – the SABC’s Hlaudi Motsoeneng, for example – because one needn’t take too great a risk in jumping to conclusions about where such people stand, grovelling on their knees like that.

Perhaps Zuma’s call for “charmers” was a response to the election manifesto the EFF unveiled at Soweto’s Orlando Stadium at the end of April.

If that document carried any weight, it would appear that, as councillors, the Effniks are going to find it rough going both in and out of office. In short, they’re going to have to work. Very hard. Their phone numbers are to be made public and their phones must be switched on night and day. They are to hold community meetings once a month.

They are not to get drunk and urinate in public. They are not to waste free wifi to watch pornography. They are not to ask for money or sex from the citizenry.

And in the course of their duties they will attain a status of neo-Maoist nirvana: their egos will be abolished, as will material attachments to personal success; they will become professional in their approach to the political question of revolution; they will not hold grudges or complain about unnecessary matters; they will read the relevant literature and listen to the people so they may understand their life of drudgery; they will never be bored, depressed or sad, for there will always be something to do in the way of revolutionary actions; and they will not dwell in the conspicuous consumerist practices that seek to blindly show off privilege.

In other words, they will be not in any way resemble the party’s leadership, especially their commander-in-chief, Julius Malema.

But back to the ANC’s personal hygiene. That old adage of cleanliness being next to godliness may well be one that the ruling party does take to heart, going on, as it often does, about its own divinity.

The president has on more than one occasion suggested the party will rule until the second coming of Christ. Another time Zuma declared, “The ANC is the only organisation that can claim it was baptised when it was born.”

But, to the year’s other election. US president Barack Obama’s put-down of Republican contender Donald Trump is worth a mention: “Orange is not the new black.”