Hail the Supreme Leader

DEAR Comrade Oberstgruppenfuhrer Hlaudi Motsoeneng the First, Commander of the SABC in General and the Airwaves in Particular, Guardian of Local Content, Master of Invention, Supreme Defender of the Truth, I kneel before you in greeting.

Congratulations on taking the public broadcaster to new heights. There are those who say you have dragged it to new depths. Pay no heed to these counterrevolutionary quislings. Depths, as you know, are nothing more than heights in reverse. It all depends on how you look at things. And you, sir, are able to look at things in a way that beggars belief.

Speaking of beggars, please issue a decree banning the depiction or mention of beggars on your television and radio stations. People exposed to beggars will want to become beggars and soon there will be nobody left to pay your handsome salary.

Well done on forcing your radio stations to play 90 percent local music. However, I don’t understand why you never went for the full 100 percent. I hope you’re not going soft on us. Imagine if Stalin had let some of his critics live? He had to kill all 1.2 million or it wouldn’t be known as the Great Purge. It would’ve been something like the Mediocre Purge and everyone would have laughed at him.

You are Hlaudi the Magnificent and people do not laugh at you. Well, not openly. I saw someone in Woolworths the other day laughing for no apparent reason.

Sure, there’s a good chance he was laughing at the prices, but I had to make sure. I pretended to be browsing, then rabbit-punched him in the kidneys and grabbed him in a choke hold. Not an air choke, mind. That’s for amateurs. I went for the blood choke, squeezing his carotid artery until his eyes rolled into the back of his head.

“Are you,” I hissed, “laughing at Comrade Hlaudi Motsoeneng?” I only had a few seconds before he passed out, but I wasn’t giving up without an answer. He shook his head and pointed at the beetroot spaghetti, cauliflower mash, and pumpkin tagliatelle.

I also had to laugh and relaxed my grip. He dropped to the floor and I hoofed him in the nuts just in case he ever thought of laughing at you in future.

The media (The New Age) is full of praise for what you are doing and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if your boss, coach and personal hero, President Jacob “The One Who Laughs While Hurting You” Zuma, awards you the Mao Tse-Tung Medal of Honour the next time he restocks the patronage pantry.

What you have done to radio in this country is nothing short of brilliant. You could have ordered only a couple of channels to stick to local music in the hope of appeasing the likes of jazz fundamentalist Don Laka, but you didn’t. Neville Chamberlain tried a similar thing with Hitler and look how that ended. You, sir, are no Neville Chamberlain.

I should probably be honest here. I don’t listen to the radio. Never have, never will. As far as I’m concerned, radio is little more than television for the blind. You could ban radio altogether and I wouldn’t even notice. It’s not a bad idea. With the savings on royalties alone, you’d be able to buy yourself a modest island in the Caribbean. Give it some thought.

I understand your pro patria policy has also been extended to ‘Pastor’ Hlaudi Motsoeneng is on a crusade to clean up the SABC. No more sex and violence. Just rabbits.

You might not have your matric, but you do have an honorary degree from the Joseph Goebbels School of Smoke and Mirrors.

Rabbits are good. People love rabbits. I am quite happy to produce a 900-part series on rabbits. White ones, black ones, fat ones, thin ones, smart ones, silly ones. If you’d rather not have white ones, that’s fine with me.

They can all be fat and black for all I care. There will be scenes of gratuitous fornication, so a late night slot might be best. There will be a lot of eating, too. And sleeping. Rabbits are big sleepists. I see it as a sort of Big Brother, only with rabbits. Viewers will go mad for it. They might even start paying their licence fees.

Scrapping all international shows and films and replacing them with home-grown content (rabbits) will be widely welcomed by the 1.57 million people who force themselves to sit through The Bold and the Beautiful or the 2 million who suffer in silence through Days of Our Lives and Snow White and the Huntsman.

Freelance producers must be ecstatic at this new development. It costs around R5 000 to produce one minute of television. This means that men with moonbags and ponytails are set to become the wealthiest in the country. Not in terms of money, of course. The SABC doesn’t have the money to pay for this deluge of local content.

This is where my show comes in. I foresee a surplus of rabbits after the first season of Big Bunny Brother. So you pay the producers in rabbits. A hundred of the floppyeared vermin for a documentary, a thousand for a feature film. Feel free to claim the idea as your own.

I believe you met independent producers the other day. Why did nobody tell me? Is it because I live in Durban? This is the home of the bunny chow, for heaven’s sake. We could have wrapped this up right there and then at Orcland Park.

One thing I like about you is that you don’t bother with public participation. Your attitude is, “You have an idea? Bring it to Hlaudi. I and I alone will decide.”

This is the way it should be. Genghis Khan would never have united the Mongol tribes through any namby-pamby process of consultation. On the other hand, he was a big fan of meritocracy. You’re no Genghis Khan.

This is my favourite quote from that meeting: “The team that I work with, they should walk like me and talk like me – that is what I am expecting from them. That is how I run the organisation, because we need to sing one song at the SABC and that song should be sung by everybody within the organisation.”

I couldn’t agree more. Great organisations are underpinned by great songs. Without the Horst Wessel song, for instance, Germany might never have been the great nation it was from 1933 to 1945.

I have been practising talking like you, but it’s not going well. I still come across as coherent and educated. Perhaps it will be easier if I just learn to walk like you.

You also said, “We have given instructions. The ‘how’ is not my business.” Your use of illeism in this instance is commendable and not in any way an indication that you might be a narcissistic zealot.

Instructions have been given. How they are carried out is irrelevant. Rightly so. Comrade Mugabe gave the order for white farms to be confiscated. It was not his business to ensure they were taken over by people who knew their plough from their poephol. And few would deny the success story that Zimbabwe is today.

Compadre, you are a man who knows powerful people. They, in turn, know other people. Who also know people, but once you get this far from the centre of power you need not bother with those. Have faith. Do you see what I’m getting at? No? Let me spell it out. Does the name Faith Muthambi ring a bell? Of course it does. She is the Minister of Communications. She has a degree from the University of Venda, whatever that is, and she calls you several times a day.

Not with instructions, obviously. That would be inappropriate. You are, after all, a Man. I imagine you simply chat about this, that and the other thing. The other thing obviously being the profound and lasting subversion of the public broadcaster’s mandate.