HERE at the Mahogany Ridge any sort of posh wine on our shelves is known simply as a Pinochet. This is because, like any good Latin American despot, the bottle has been festooned with an array of gold and silver medals to scare us into believing it's superior muck.
From time to time, there is talk of stretching the joke to a Videla or a Stroessner, but nothing beats the ring of the late Chilean dictator's name. It even rhymes with chardonnay.
Besides, once you tire of rummaging in the old juntas for boozy appropriations, your attention soon drifts towards our national affairs and in no time at all you'll have at your disposal a whole new lexicon with which to amuse your sodden pals.
A Jacob Zuma, for example, is the fourth double brandy-and-coke, the one that has you lurching off to bother the women at the other end of the bar. A Mac Maharaj, meanwhile, is the fifth brandy, the one that compels you to return to the women to explain the context of what you tried to say in the first place. This invariably makes things worse - and you risk some outraged harridan tossing her Pinochet in your face.
Which brings us, fittingly, to the national police commissioner, General Riah Phiyega, who has invited us to throw mud at her.
It's a challenge of sorts, because she believes that, no matter how hard we try, dirt refuses to have anything to do with her. It's as she's made out of teflon or leftover bits of Ronald Reagan. Which, when you think about it, is odd because the Phiyega, in Ridge-speak, is a sticky, sweet cocktail, one that quite uniquely tastes rather better coming up than it does going down.
Phiyega faces charges of defeating the ends of justice and breaching national security for allegedly alerting a provincial police commissioner that he was being investigated by the Hawks in relation to an apparent bribe from some druglord. It's a grubby business and the DA's Diane Kohler Barnard has been making a suitable fuss, demanding that Phiyega's "alleged interference" be investigated.
Incidentally, a DKB is exactly the same as a Jacob Zuma. Except it's made with cheap rum, not brandy, and it leads you into situations where you swear and pick a fight with people, not attempt to charm yourself into their beds.
Speaking of our president, our thoughts did turn to his recent spot of bother. Were the chattering classes correct in dumping on the chief for his comments about not thinking "like Africans in Africa" when it came to e-tolling? Was it an insult to suggest "This is Johannesburg. It is not some national road in Malawi."
Author and commentator Max du Preez thinks not, and has suggested Zuma's comments clearly referred only to the issue of e-tolling, and the various charges of Afro-pessimism, self-hatred and xenophobia were baseless. He has a point. Zuma also said Gauteng was not like Rustenburg. Which is true. The one is much bigger than the other.
But the Malawians were concerned enough to summon the SA high commissioner to Malawi, Cassandra Makone, to Lilongwe to explain just what the hey the big guy was on about. Makone did a quick Maharaj job, saying that Zuma was quoted out of context. That apparently did the trick and tensions, as they say, have been soothed and the bilateral relations remain unimpaired.
And that's how it should have stayed. But no. We had to further foul things up by sending in the deputy foreign minister, the charmless Marius Fransman, as well. Now the Malawians are really annoyed, umbrage has been taken and they want to go to war with us. They're sharpening their spears and making little piles of rocks even as I drink. (Actually no, they're not. I just made that up. But they really should be offended. Fransman is such an embarrassment we cannot even begin to imagine what kind of drink he'd be.)
With hindsight, it's clear what the president should have told his supporters on Monday evening. If, as it has been suggested, he wanted to stress the importance of a well-maintained and efficient road system in a sophisticated economic infrastructure, then he should have used, not Malawi or Rustenburg as an example, but Nkandla.
Here, after all, was the kind of backwater that would make a ditch seem luxurious by comparison. But no more. Once they built a superhighway there with the people's money, things changed. Now it is KwaZulu-Natal's very own Gbadolite.
Okay, so it's not quite as ostentatious as the Versailles-like palace Mobuto Seso Seke slung up in the jungles of the Congo, and Nkandla's really a sort of Gbadolite Lite, if we must think in those terms. But give the man time, give him time.
A version of this article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
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