It dismantles the Scorpions led by Gerrie Nel, so that an enfeebled prosecution service leads the judge to acquit a criminal gang boss in one of the most notorious murder trials in the country's history.

 At the United Nations, it votes with totalitarian states exercising the death penalty, including Iran, Cuba, China  and Saudi Arabia, to exclude extrajudicial, arbitrary and summary executions of homosexual people from a list of state killings deemed reprehensible.

In its political home base of KwaZulu-Natal, it drags on and on a trial of 12 impoverished shackdwellers - the object of an attack 14 months ago, in which an armed pogrom mob carried out an assault shouting "The AmaMpondo are taking over Kennedy. Kennedy is for the AmaZulu" - without the arrest of a single one of the pogromists, despite information linking the attackers to local ANC political structures.

If it swims like a duck, sits like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, you call it a duck.

This duck is the government of South Africa.

"By their deeds shall ye know them."

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