These are terrible times, full of fear and dancing on knife edges. The military has been placed on high alert (it says here), the mines are grinding to a standstill, the government stands idly by as the crises pile up and the demagogue Jelly Tsotsi blusters and bullstuffs hither and thither across the gold and platinum fields, whipping the nation's talk radio listeners into a frenzy of some dudgeon.

The whining is dreadful. "Hi John it's the media's fault if they didn't constantly put the limelight on him and build him up and make him a monument of this he wouldn't be like you know the focus of attention and none of this would have happened and why can't they just arrest him or do something about anything hey?" 

Here at the Mahogany Ridge, however, we are not afraid. And we are not uncertain. We have a suggestion, and it is this: let's all wear rubber wristbands that feature in prominent type (for easy reference when inspired leadership is required) the letters "WWBD" -- What Would Biko Do?

Actually, on second thoughts, let's not do that at all, make an abominably cheesy, Lance Armstrong-styled religiosity of Steve Biko's legacy. Besides, thanks to the flood of opinion pieces in the fish wraps commemorating the 35th anniversary of his death, we do have a fairly good idea what he'd be doing if he were still with us.

In no particular order: Biko would be outraged, saddened, pausing for thought; he would be leading the country, he would be taking the ruling party to task for its lies and broken promises, he would be teaching the dispossessed and downtrodden self-reliance and self-esteem rather than service delivery and the tenderpreneurial wallow, and he probably wouldn't even vote because the ANC has corrupted and defiled the very nature of democracy itself; and, more urgently, he would be taking legal action against the singer Simphiwe Dana in a bid to stop the self-proclaimed Goddess of Cool from referring to him as her grandfather.

He may even have questioned his alleged connection with the defence force members Jelly addressed on Wednesday, a meeting that prompted the full-blown platz by the defence minister, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, who started bleating on about an ill-disciplined, mutinous military being a direct threat to the country.

It turned out that the hundred or so who attended the meeting with the expelled ANC Youth League leader weren't much in the soldier department. They were sacked by the SANDF in 2009 following a march on the Union Buildings over pay that turned into a riot but managed to get their dismissal overturned by the courts. They then refused to resume their duties when they discovered that a wage deal had been hammered out in their absence. None of this has mattered to Jelly, who has compared the soldiers' struggle to that of Chris Hani and Biko.

Meanwhile, something has stirred in government. President Jacob Zuma has demanded urgent dithering on the mining crisis. Justice minister Jeff Radebe has stepped up to the plate and declared that the ongoing violent strikes could be damaging to the economy, and government would not tolerate this.

There has been talk of "swift action" to stabilise the situation in what has been described as "not a state of emergency", and the authorities have been at pains to stress that whatever this action may be -- and in this regard they have been as vague and as noncommittal as ever -- it wasn't necessarily aimed at "any one individual".

This was despite earlier indications that government was indeed planning to curb Jelly. As Zuma put it, there were "people of some description who are going there to instigate miners to operate in a particular way. It cannot be accepted. And therefore we are looking into that, we are going to be acting very soon."

Earlier, he'd been asked about "the uncontrollable Polokwane political Frankenstein . . . created by yourself," and, laughing, he'd replied, "I shouldn't be blamed for somebody who has some characteristic of his own. It's not my fault. I never participated in the production of such a person."

I'm not as sure of that and I'm not even certain who was the monster in this case, and who was its mad scientist creator. But I'm quite sure the reference would be lost on Jelly.

His biographer, Fiona Forde, once told me that he didn't get the joke in calling him "Jelly Tsotsi". I wondered if anybody could really be that stupid, or whether Forde was just selling me a line. After all, she was trying to flog her book, An Inconvenient Truth: Julius Malema and the "New" ANC, and why not appeal to my vanity and tell me I'm such a clever chap?

This article first appeared in The Weekend Argus

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