Insult to intelligence

Congratulations to Tshakhuma Tsha Madzivhandila (TTM) for winning the Nedbank Cup and their African safari now beckons.

Last week Limpopo MEC for Sport, Thandi Moraka, went public that TTM promised her they would bring back the silverware and true as steel they kept to their promise.

I am going to keep the MEC part of this confab because according to one Titus Mamabolo, she has been parsimonious with the truth.

For the dilettante, Titus Mamabolo hails from Ga-Mamabolo and is the first black athlete to win a national track title at the 1974 South African Open Championships in Pretoria and was the second black athlete to be awarded national colours.

The 80-year-old veteran claims that the MEC made him promises that he would be honoured for this contribution to athletics in South Africa and he has been in limbo since that promise was made.

I shudder to reason why, in this democratic space we live in, Moraka cannot summon the powers vested in her to honour Mamabolo if the apartheid government was able to do the same at a time it was not fashionable for blacks to be recognised as they were regarded and treated as second class citizens of this country.

Moraka is an accomplished politician in her own right and I am not suitably qualified to pass judgement on her political credentials and exploits.

Because that is not my forte but here lies an occasion for her to redeem herself to demystify the perception that most politicians say what they don’t mean.

I am consciously and deliberately throwin caution to the wind to avoid her following in the footsteps of our national Minister of Sport whose latest modus operandi has been to send congratulatory and condolence messages to our athletes.

The MEC would not want to be remembered like her antecedent who had media-frenzy and left no legacy that anyone can remember.

In case my counsel is not heeded, at least a phone call to him to wish him a belated 80th birthday would suffice.

He turned 80 on 7 January – a day before the African National Congress January 8 statement.

As a cadre of the movement, that date should be easy to remember.

The ancestors may annoy you but don’t make the mistake of annoying them back, they may annoy you forever.