OUT TO LUNCH

It’s always a source of immense joy to me when I see my fellow South Africans happy. After all, these are troubled times and it isn’t always possible to put on a happy face but, thankfully, many manage to do so. Take the COSATU march against the rise in the cost of living last week for example.

You’d think that anyone involved in such a march (assuming they knew why they were marching and weren’t just there for the free KFC) would be a bit on the gloomy side but you’d be wrong.

There they all were in Pretoria and Cape Town, clad in their signature red regalia and dancing and singing to bring down the cost of living. Well, when I say dancing it was more of that shuffling from foot to foot which does look more like an urgent need for a toilet but it is rhythmic in its own way and seems to make the crowd happy. But you can never fault the singing.

Wonderful harmonies and everyone seems to know the words. One has to wonder whether they have clandestine choir practices before these events.

Many of those who attended would no doubt be on a ‘no work, no pay’ arrangement with their employers. This is one of those ludicrously outdated colonialist ideas that dictates that you should only pay people who turn up and work for you. They would nobly have given up a day’s wages to protest against the fact that the wages they do earn don’t buy nearly as much as they did this time last year.

It’s possible that some of those attending the COSATU protest don’t actually have jobs but didn’t have much else to occupy their day and thought it might be nice to get a free COSATU t-shirt. I have to say that if I were unemployed and sitting bored out of my mind every day the prospect of a pleasant day out singing and dancing with like minded individuals would be very tempting.

The question though is what does COSATU hope to achieve with this protest? We know they have a slightly ludicrous history when it comes to such things. Such as leading workers out on strike to protest against the same workers about to be made redundant. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

To simple minds like mine that would just seem to be bringing the whole process forward. After all, if it’s certain you are going to lose your job in four weeks why would you want to sacrifice your last few weeks of pay? But union leader’s minds move in mysterious ways and they do seem to exercise a Svengali like influence over their members at times.

Do COSATU leaders honestly believe that by putting a few hundred of their members on the streets that the price of cooking oil and petrol will fall? I doubt if they do but the privileged life of a union leader is paid through union subscriptions and those have been dwindling of late as the unemployment numbers have risen. If they want to keep that Mercedes or Range Rover in the garage they have to sell the dream to their members and hope that nobody asks too many questions. Thus far the scam seems to be working.

The second cause of immense joy last week took place in Tongaat and involved the burning of JoJo water storage tanks. Judging by the videos I saw on social media the crowd were loving it and I have to say that there is nothing like the sight of a burning and melting JoJo tank to lift the spirits on a sunny day.

The clouds of acrid black smoke also add that extra bit of character to the atmosphere of the place. The laughing happy crowd were enjoying the show so much that a couple of obliging youngsters went off to find another JoJo tank to roll down the hill and set fire to and nobody was going to stop them. Judging by the relaxed attitude of the spectators nobody would have wanted to spoil the party.

The point of the now non-existent JoJo tanks was to store water in an area that hasn’t had water apparently for four months since the Natal floods. Press reports said they were donated by Gift of the Givers who also installed boreholes.

Now the Tongaat community have ‘demanded’ that the eThekwini municipality replace the JoJo tanks that were burned last week. Whether this is to store the scarce resource of water in the area or because they have run out of JoJo tanks to burn remains to be seen. As one commentator on social media put it “This level of stupidity is unmatched”. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

The final surge of immense joy was the dismissal of AfriForum’s case against the EFF last week in the Johannesburg High Court. Judge Edwin Molahlehi ruled that the singing of “Shoot the Boer” isn’t hate speech or racist and is merely a struggle ditty designed to cheer up the downtrodden.

Of course, he didn’t quite put it that way but that was the gist. Killing the farmer and killing the boer are deep rooted cultural sentiments among some communities and those precious cultural feelings need to be protected under law. As do utterances about slitting the throat of whiteness.

I suppose it is possible that Judge Molahlehi, having drawn the short straw to hear this case, decided to play it safe by rejecting all Afriforum’s expert witnesses and accepting all the EFF’s. The personal repercussions should the case have gone against the EFF would have been immense and, judging by the chanting mob outside, the good judge would have been lucky to make it out alive.

Just after the judgement the joyful EFF mob (not the slimmest people I have ever seen) started singing the offending song while waving their hands in the shape of a gun. eNCA’s on the spot reporter Heidi Giokos tried to pretend that they were singing ‘kiss the farmer, kiss the boer” but sadly the mob’s body language didn’t convey the same message.

So the question now is will I be allowed to sing ‘shoot the cadre, shoot the VBS thief’ with no fear of prosecution? I rather doubt it and, besides, I’m not sure that we should be encouraging the killing or hatred of any racial group if we want to survive as a country.

More worrying though is the fact that Judge Molahlehi has given encouragement to the EFF to up their game, which they almost certainly will do. The euphemism ‘ethnic cleansing’ sounds terribly hygienic and innocent but it refers to the systematic and violent removal of one race group by another. That has been the EFF’s aim all along and, to their credit, they have never made any secret of it.

As far as they are concerned all whites are descendants of rapists, murderers and land thieves and need to be dealt with as such. In addition, they are exploiters of the black working class. Only when the throat of whiteness has been slit can the rightful owners of this country truly prosper.

Now the green light has been given by a court of law to carry on with business as usual. Times are about to get even happier in South Africa.

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Xi (who must be obeyed) Jinping doesn’t strike me as much of a fun guy. He has the look of a man who has just eaten a bad oyster but doesn’t want to throw up in front of the guests. But, as the late lamented P J O’Rourke reminded us, the really bad thing about communism isn’t the fact it is a ludicrously inefficient, provenly disastrous and dishonest form of government. It’s the communists themselves that make it so awful.

Xi Jinping is going for an unprecedented third term as head boy of the Chinese Communist Party and one wonders whether this hasn’t put a few noses out of joint. Surely there must have been other, equally humourless, commie party members who had their eye on the top prize after his departure.

The interesting question though is whether things are beginning to seriously fall apart in China. Sichuan province, which has a population higher than that of South Africa, is experiencing an unprecedented heatwave combined with a drought.

Sichuan is the home of the country’s largest hydro-electric power generator which normally provides 30% of the country’s electricity needs.