Fixit for all gaffes

Locals seem to think they can sin with impunity sorry‘ will cover it, writes MADALA THEPA

IT’S a shallow, silly act to say “I’m sorry”.

Yet public figures do it all the time when they’re in a fix, when their already low behaviour sinks further down the shaft.

Some are good at splitting semantic hairs in public, such as DA leader Helen Zille with her “refugee ” comment. Zille stuck to her guns until the furore over her remark cost her party some weakminded member s who defected, using the row as their fed-up clutch.

She was left with no option but to package the beautiful words for public consumption:

“I’m sor ry.”

But it was too late because parents in the Eastern Cape and elsewhere had already eaten their children’s crayons and were spitting mad.

Remember how Ras Nhlahla killed the national anthem in foreign lands and made us the laughing stock of the earth?

And, I must add, with an endearing penchant for mischief.

Instead of having his dreads sheared in public to show remorse for misleading the public with that comical rendition, Ras continued to enjoy life with his mane while local ladies swooned over his borrowed accent.

You might also recall how ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu became a pawn in the game of comments on social media and earned his pop culture sobriquet “Boozing Jacko”.

Mr Mthembu was caught behind the wheel a bit overwhelmed, almost crippled by the New Zealand’s Chiefs on Supersport on Saturday April 21.

He is said to have used the word after Chiefs wing Lelia Masaga clashed heads with Sharks wing Lwazi Mvovo.

This is how he apparently put it: Lelia Masaga has gone head high in an absolute coconut tackle, straight onto Lwazi Mvovo, and tried to take his head off.”

He went to the media to apologise with these sorry words: Never seen it like that, heard the term and thought it meant aiming for the nut no harm meant. Sorry.”

I thought coconut meant white on the inside and black on the outside. But it seems it’s all about context.

The media network kids stepped in to explain: Coconut is a racist term to describe a pacific islander. It’s like calling a black man the N-word.

Apparently Masaga was born in New Zealand, but has Samoan heritage. That’s why the utterance is seen as derogator y.

What this says about Skinstad is that it is great to be born privileged because you grow up pretending not to know the difference between racial derogatory terms and good bashing jokes.

This means he should also know that aiming for the nut” doesn’t always mean tackling the actual nuts. So his sor ry” is shallow, as with the rest of them

who say it.