Not a crumb of shame after premier fast-food splurge

OMETIMES the utterances of our leaders leave me breathless with amazement. When asked why she had used her official credit card to spend more than R50 000 on fast food during her first 10 weeks in office, Northern Cape Premier Sylvia Lucas was reported to have said indignantly: “How would we have eaten if we didn’t use taxpayers’ money?”

The good lady earns an annual salary of R1.9 million. Maybe she could have lowered herself to do what ordinary human beings do and paid for her food out of her salary. Everybody else does.

Other people are expected to use their salaries to feed themselves and their families. Apparently Lucas has more important things to do with her pay cheque. She can’t go wasting it on mundane stuff like food.

The premier reportedly spent more than R26 500 on fast food in a single month. The Northern Cape is one of the country’s poorest provinces and I don’t suppose

Smany of its inhabitants earn anywhere near R26 500 a month. It must be slightly galling for them to learn that their leader manages to chow through that sum an KFC and Nando’s meals while they have to manage on watered-down porridge.

As I have said before, the really sad part of all this is that nobody ever seems embarrassed or shamed by these revelations.

Meanwhile, many of the people she leads must have thought: “How would she have managed to eat R26 000 worth of food in a month, no matter who paid for it?”

Obviously, politics is exhausting work. We can’t have our leaders fainting on the job from hunger, can we? We live in an interesting country.

I travelled to Tulbagh recently and was puzzled by the fact that no road signs indicated that I was heading for that town. All the way from the N2 and past Wellington there were signs pointing the way to Ceres, which is beyond Tulbagh.

You have to travel past Tulbagh to get to Ceres, but the signs don’t tell you that.

I asked a local farmer why there were no signs pointing to Tulbagh and he gave an interesting answer. Apparently the road traffic law states you can only erect a road sign if the road actually passes through the town. In other words, the town must be on the way to somewhere else.

The road to Ceres doesn’t actu- ally pass through Tulbagh, so it doesn’t officially exist, signwise.

The road that does go into Tulbagh stops there. If you want to leave the town you have to turn round and come back the way you went in. That seems to disqualify it as a road-sign destination.

Tulbagh is rather an interesting little town. I’m surprised that it’s being kept an official secret. A news photographer was told to go out and get some aerial shots of a mountain fire. His news editor said an aircraft would be waiting for him at the airfield.

The photographer rushed off to the airfield, saw a plane standing in front of the hangar and jumped into it.

“Take off and head north,” he said, and once they were airborne he shouted: “Get to that mountain as fast as you can, then fly as low over the fire as you can.”

“Why should I do that?” asked the pilot.

“Because I’m a photographer and photographers take photographs,” snapped the cameraman.”

After a pause the pilot said: “You mean you’re not my flying instructor?”