SURPRISE of the raised eyebrows sort as President Jacob Zuma this week claimed to know a bit about sleep disorders, telling supporters in Mpumalanga that "when a person is walking while dreaming it means he is unstable".
It means, of course, nothing of the sort - even as a reference to the ruling party's detractors. But then this was in Mpumalanga, which is a strange part of the country and they believe in all sorts of stuff up there .
Like the president's claim that the the ANC would "continue to run this government for ever and ever". That sort of arrogance, of concern to opposition parties, certainly does go down a treat with the faithful and it could well be that even the president thinks it's true.
But here at the Mahogany Ridge we accept that such hubris is par for the course in an election year; all gods, if you must know, were immortal, just as the Soviets and the Third Reich would rule for all time. So, notwithstanding the possibility that it was the president who may have been both walking and talking while dreaming, we were not particularly alarmed at Zuma's comments.
What is a little more worrying, though, was the president's call on supporters to ensure the ANC wins more than two-thirds of the vote in the election, saying that this would enable him to fiddle a bit with the constitution.
"We want a huge majority this time," he was quoted as saying, "because we want to change certain things that couldn't be changed with a small majority, so that we move forward because there are certain hurdles. People talk about a constitution they have never seen. We saw that constitution."
Annoyingly, Zuma did not specify what changes he had in mind. The Presidency wouldn't comment and referred queries back to the ANC. But party spokesman Jackson Mthembu was having none of that. "I'm not the one who was making the speech," he told The Times. "Ask him. It is unfair to us for you ask us to decode someone else's speech."
Well, if we may be of some help here.
Firstly, the bit about a victory by a "huge majority". There is considered opinion out there that this won't happen.
Number-crunching boffins have been pointing out for some time now that support has been on the wane. They predict that, although they'll win the elections, the ANC will be getting less than 60% of the national vote and will suffer substantial losses in a number of provinces - although probably not in Mpumalanga.
The problem, as we see it, is that the president must somehow convince the National Assembly that it is 57% of the vote, or thereabouts, that is enough to give the ruling party the two-thirds majority it needs to change the constitution and not, as previously supposed, 66.6% which, anyway, is either some sort of unwelcome Western mathematical construct or the work of the devil.
In this regard, he could turn to his education ministers, Blade Nzimande and Angie Motshekga, for assistance. Both have done extraordinary work in recent years in subverting standard perceptions of success and failure.
As Zuma put it: "Did you see how well the matriculants performed? We identified weaknesses in the education system and built a foundation. It will never have weaknesses again." Just don't ask what they've done with those "weaknesses" - or draw attention to the drop-out rate in high schools.
Nzimande, in particular, has been tireless in his efforts to free our universities of troubling foreign cultures and this Stalinist may soon be in a position to claim responsibility for single-handedly reversing the brain drain. But more of that another time.
Our bigger challenge, though, would be to identify in the constitution those "certain things" and "hurdles" that are not allowing the ruling party to "move forward". That done, we'd need to know whether their removal would be in the country's best interests - or in the president's.
One could ask, but it would be a silly question - for whatever suits the president naturally suits the rest of us. It follows, logically, that constitutional amendments granting current and former presidents immunity from criminal prosecution, especially in connection with such frivolous matters as racketeering and fraud charges, would obviously be of necessity to a healthy democracy.
For what use is a president whose only ambition was to remain in office in order to avoid landing up in court again, where he could face a possible jail sentence?
It is somewhat fitting that the state, through its security agencies, should turn such a president's country home into a prison.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
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