A FAMOUS GROUSE

THREE months ago he expressed a yearning to moer a Boer. Now Obakeng Ramabodu doesn’t want them to cut the grass in Pretoria’s parks — even at their own expense.

This is not surprising. The pugnacious Ramabodu, one of those Redshirts who have not yet joined the mass exodus from the Economic Freedom Fighters, enjoys an arresting career (if that is the term) as a Tshwane metro councillor. 

Last week, the city’s latest mayor, Action SA’s Nasiphi Moya, appointed Ramabodu to her mayoral executive. He is now the MMC for environmental affairs and agriculture.  ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

It is an important position, one that comes with many responsibilities, and Ramabodu has wasted no time in indicating that he is up for the job; he has, accordingly, announced that, as one of his first priorities, he wishes to cancel a memorandum of understanding between the city and Afriforum.

City Press reports that Romabadu is vehemently opposed to the NGO assisting the council with any service delivery issue. This includes collaborating on projects to protect the city’s infrastructure with such services as the removal of invasive plant species, the identification of illegal dumping sites, contributing to community safety, discouraging land invasions and, as mentioned, tending to lawns here and there.

Regarding the latter, Afriforum CEO Kallie Kriel and then DA mayor Cilliers Brink marked the occasion of the memorandum’s signing in March by hopping on large tractor-mowers to ceremonially cut the grass at a public park in Centurion. 

Ramabodu wants none of this sort of civic-minded behaviour. He has offered no explanation why he wishes to terminate the arrangement other than it is “nonsensical”. For his part, Kriel has said there is no cancellation clause in the memorandum, which is valid for five years. “But,” he added, “we don’t need your permission to improve the communities we live in. We will work to improve our communities, with or without you.”

Given the history, this looks set to be a fractious relationship. Ramabodu obviously has a difficulty with what we may term “privilege”. This much was evident at a chaotic council meeting in July where a beleaguered Brink had refused to apologise for remarks to the effect that the ANC’s days of looting were not yet over. Much shouting and heckling had followed as a result. 

Matters however escalated dramatically when Ramabodu was allegedly threatened with violence, and he told the meeting: “I would be happy to moer a Boer; that would be nice. I want the blood of an Afrikaner, I want it.”  

After a lunch break, the council Speaker, Mncedi Ndzwanana, ordered Ramabodu to apologise and retract the statement. Which he did. Sort of: 

“I see that [what I said] is trending even on social media … I was told I was going to be beaten, and I said, ‘I would suck the blood of an Afrikaner’ — but if that was taken out of context … then I will apologise and withdraw.”

That is now all by the by. Such incidents, however, are indicative of a much larger breakdown in governance. While the ANC has managed to cling on to power on a national level, thanks to its coalition with the DA, it appears unable or unwilling to foster such an arrangement at a provincial or local level, and instead chooses to truck with mavericks like the EFF and any number of one-seater, winky-puff parties. 

It was such a coalition that put paid to Brink. His ousting must be seen in the context of the ANC shedding support by the truckload in Gauteng, the country’s most populous and richest province. 

They lost outright control of its three metros — Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane — in the 2016 local elections, a downward trend that continues. Multiple coalitions have ensued, much to the advantage of the Mickey Mouse parties now cluttering the political landscape and no-one else, least of all the province’s citizens.

The ANC’s national leadership appears to be quite tolerant of all this arse and chaos: one sort of coalition at a national level and, in terms ideology if not competence, a wholly different one for Gauteng. And why not? It keeps them nominally in charge of the province, despite the fact that such mayhem exposes a major rift in party dynamics. Perhaps they feel that, if they don’t mention it, the mess will disappear. 

This is, to say the least, unlikely. In the long run, though, this renegade waywardness does weaken the ANC’s faith in “democratic centralism” — Stalinism to you and I — and strengthens the case for devolution and more power to provinces to look after their own affairs without interference from Luthuli House.

A weighty matter

There have been mixed reactions, here in the UK, to the British government’s plans to give weight-loss injections to unemployed people living with obesity in a bid to get them back to work. A five-year trial of the drug Mounjaro has been announced for the greater Manchester area, with the pharmaceutical giant, Lilly, investing £279-million in the scheme which will hopefully cut worklessness and ease pressure on overburdened health services.

Critics of the plan, described as “Victorian” in its attitudes towards the poor, maintain that it’s unethical as it focused on the potential economic value of citizens rather than their health. Incentivising unemployed people who are obese was not new and had gone down “very badly” in the past, according to Dr Dolly van Tulleken, an obesity policy specialist. 

She also told the BBC that the scheme was “unrealistic” as the number of those eligible for such a programme was “in the millions” but “specialist weight management services” were only able to treat 49 000 people a year. (There are some 600 000 adults living with obesity in Manchester.)

This business of greatly expanded waistlines is by no means confined to Britain and I imagine the ANC, hell-bent on pursuing its own plans for a national health insurance, will be keeping an eye on the progress of the Mounjaro trial. 

I also wonder whether, given the high levels of obesity in South Africa, there may have been some resentment that Lilly did not approach Pretoria with a generous offer to bankroll such a weight-loss programme.

The unfortunate reality here, though, is that while the drugs may yield results in the short term, the country’s beggared economy is such that poverty and poor nutrition, the principal factors responsible for the obesity epidemic, will be with us for ages yet. In other words: no jobs, no weight loss.

But the jabs could work wonders for government. While few of us, I suspect, are specialists in this field, it is obvious even to the most casual observer that, since the late 2000s, South African cabinet ministers have dramatically increased in size. In fact, it could be said, that as the cabinet grew ever larger, so too did its ministers and deputy ministers. 

The question, though, is whether glute-fuls of Mounjaro will be enough to get slimmed-down ANC ministers to do their jobs. True, the kilograms may fall off at a startling rate to reveal the svelte and sylph-like that have been locked within for years, but will they put in an honest day’s work?

There has been fascinating research in this regard. A 2020 study of 15 post-Soviet states by Pavlo Blavatskyy of the Montpellier Business School in France found that, the more overweight the government, the more corrupt the country.

Using an algorithm to analyse photographs of almost 300 cabinet ministers and estimate their body-mass index, a measure of obesity, Blavatskyy found that the median BMI of a country’s cabinet is highly correlated with its level of corruption, as measured by indices compiled by the World Bank and Transparency International.

According to the study, the four least corrupt post-Soviet states are Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia — countries which also boast the slimmest cabinet ministers. Meanwhile, the most corrupt countries — Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — have the fattest cabinet ministers. 

It also emerged that, despite Vladimir Putin’s carefully cultivated image as a strongman who wrestles naked with bears for sport, the Russian cabinet is reportedly just as “flabby” as those in neighbouring countries. “Perhaps, like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, [Putin] prefers to have about him men that are fat, fearing the ‘hungry’ look of the lean men,” the Economist drily noted. “He is wrong, Mr Blavatskyy’s data suggest. The tubby may look content but appear to be more grasping.”

South Africa, of course, is not a post-Soviet state. But this has not stopped the headlong rush for the buffet table. Far from it.

Friends and allies

Here at the Slaughtered Lamb (“Finest Ales & Pies”), there is a suggestion that membership of Brics or a desire to join the organisation is another sure-fire indication of state corruption, the world leaders currently attending the Brics summit in Kazan, Tatarstan, being a case in point. 

Cyril Ramaphosa is naturally delighted to be chewing the fat with the, uh, heavyweights at this Putin-hosted anti-Western jamboree and is full of praise for Moscow, which he has described as a “valued ally … who supported us from the very beginning in the fight against apartheid” and so on. But quite why Squirrel isn’t at this week’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting instead is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he thinks it’s time we put what’s left of the British empire behind us and sell off the family silver to the Kremlin. Being a Putin bitch is obviously the way to go now.

Tatarstan, incidentally, is a member of the Russian federation. It is, as such, technically a post-Soviet state but is still very much Soviet in nature. There is, for example, this official press release from the state procurement committee regarding the Brics summit:

“The attention of the whole world will be attracted to the Republic of Tatarstan. We have never had such an event in terms of scale and significance — 32 participating countries and more than 20 leaders of states … By the summit in Kazan, 18 parks and squares were landscaped, 56 thousand trees and 41 thousand shrubs were planted, 29 road sections were repaired. For the convenience of citizens and guests of the city, 157 new buses and 39 trolleybuses were purchased.”

This is the sort of new world order they want in Tshwane — but only once they do away Afriforum and their counter-revolutionary lawnmowers.