OUT TO LUNCH

The sad sight of Cape Town’s Parliamentary Buildings on fire on the second day of 2022 (a new year’s revolution was my first thought) seemed wholly appropriate as a fitting symbol of almost twenty eight years of ANC misrule and political sabotage.

Pretty much everything the ANC has touched in that time has turned out to be a complete disaster and it would be pointless to list yet again the hundreds of ways in which the country has been impoverished by the greed and corruption of a political party that is little more than a front for organised crime.

But life goes on and nothing is about to change. The touching photo of Raymond Zondo handing over the first copy of his 874 page tome to Cyril Ramaphosa just before the ANC’s 110 birthday celebration in Limpopo was presumably part of the propaganda to assure us that the ANC bigwigs have finally realised the error of their ways and are about to set South Africa back on a course of economic recovery and job creation. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For a start, I doubt whether Cyril rushed home to read his signed copy of Zondo that night. After all, he had to play golf with the great and good (those who had stumped up the moolah for the privilege of playing this relic of colonisation with the head of state) and then he had to address the crowd at the birthday dinner.

That was the one where the lights mysteriously went out just as the Pres was drawing to a close after speaking for almost 45 minutes. Fortunately, our Min of Police was onto that with commendable haste and revealed that the electrics had indeed been tampered with by a person or persons unknown.

The search for the Parliament buildings arsonist hasn’t been quite so convincing though which should come as no surprise since the country is still waiting to hear the identities of the twelve ‘known’ masterminds behind last July’s attempted destruction of the economy of an entire province.

Apparently the main suspect for the almost entire torching of the National Assembly turns out to be a homeless man who, judging by his performance in court, may not be the sharpest tool in the shed.

What has emerged from the initial investigation is that security within the parliamentary precinct was virtually non-existent and even the fire detection and sprinkler system wasn’t working. This is all the responsibility of the ANC but since there is little opportunity for a kickback or a bribe in such mundane matters then it’s hardly surprising that the ruling party wouldn’t have bothered with such trivialities as making sure the seat of parliament was secure. After all, what’s in it for them?

South Africans have, by now, become used to the sight of the ANC limping from one scandal to another and employing their favourite response of ‘lie and deny’ to any questions from nosy journalists.

Occasionally there is some hand wringing from President Frogboiler and a confession that the poor little lambs have been led astray but things are about to get better; but they never do.

We’ve been hearing that sort of thing for three years now and all that has happened is that our junk status country is even more impoverished, unemployment is at an ever growing all time high, people’s confidence in the future is low and most of our best known ANC crooks are still smirking at the cameras and are about as far away from a prison sentence as I am from a lottery win.

Even those who believed in Frogboiler way back when and went jogging with him in Sea Point are wondering what happened to this new dawn. The sad news is that even the legal experts are forced to admit that, despite the publication of Zondo 1, any hope of prosecutions are light years away.

This is partly due to the complexity of the cases but also due to a poorly funded NPA and the somewhat sluggish progress that organisation has demonstrated over the past couple of years.

So the bottom line if you want to be a citizen of South Africa is that you have to accept that dishonest politicians will be free to steal much more in the coming years with little fear of arrest or punishment.

Complete incompetents like Gwede Mantashe will continue to be appointed to lucrative ministerial roles for which they are disastrously ill-suited and the ANC will continue its love affair with the SA Communist Party and the all powerful unions while, at the same time, trying to convince investors that South Africa is open for business and about to launch a new job creation scheme. This, incidentally, from a party that is so broke that it cannot even afford to pay its own employees. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Now, as we are about to enter the third year of COVID, the President is suddenly talking about mandatory vaccines as a way to get the economy going again. Not very long ago he was assuring us all that mandatory vaccines would never be a reality in South Africa so I wonder what has changed his mind?

Since the country seems to have performed rather better than most of Europe (at least from a personal freedom point of view) despite our current low level of vaccination it doesn’t seem terribly sensible to ignore the science and data in front of your eyes and decide that everyone must be jabbed and then triple-boostered because the original jabs don’t really work.

There is already some resistance worldwide to the prospect of a lifetime of booster shots with punters complaining that this wasn’t what they signed up for. However, any attempt to round up the great unjabbed of South Africa and force them to have a government approved injection or lose all their personal freedoms is likely to lead to some very violent backlash across all strata of society. The year 2022 promises to become even more interesting.

*****

The Emacron virus currently afflicting France has led to much debate of late. With elections looming towards mid year some are wondering whether Emacron may be a thing of the past or whether there will be a dreaded second wave with all that might entail.

It does appear as though the French President is beginning to lose his marbles as even his own countrymen are expressing shock at his unpresidential language, particularly the bit about him wanting to ‘piss off’ the COVID unvaccinated by banning them from everything. In fact, the literal translation of ‘emmerder’ is ‘to shit on’ but that must have proved too much for the French media.

President Macron has been under a lot of stress lately and this certainly wasn’t helped by social media speculation that his wife may in fact be a trans-woman who started life as fully equipped bloke. Rather than ignore this unkind jibe Mme Macron has rather unwisely decided to pursue legal action against the originators of this conspiracy theory which is a pretty much guaranteed way of opening all sorts of personal details to public scrutiny.

What most of Europe seems to have forgotten since 1945 is that dictators don’t always have to come dressed in Hugo Boss designed uniforms. Most dictators in the past have favoured military uniforms to add a little bit more menace to the physical expression of their wishes. But those days are long gone and the behavioural scientists have advised against uniforms because they spook the people.

These days you are far more likely to have your personal freedoms curtailed by a clean shaven politician in an open neck shirt, chinos and a sports jacket. What’s to fear?

President Macron’s desire to curtail the freedoms of the French unvaxxed stops short at the moment of sending them to prison but, in fairness, he may still have an election to fight so that can come later.

Some of his European counterparts haven’t been quite so squeamish though and in Italy a COVID vaccine is mandatory for the over 50’s and in Greece the over 60’s will be fined €100 for every month they delay the jab.

The Netherlands is still working on depriving their citizens of their individual rights although recent footage of the brutal police reaction to what appeared to be a largely peaceful demonstration revealed a frightening enthusiasm among many heavily armoured and visored robo-cop lookalikes for beating the shit out of their fellow countrymen.

The odd thing is that all this is taking place in countries that are already heavily vaccinated and still the message hasn’t got through that the vaccines are not the solution they were initially presented as. The message is unlikely to get through because the only science that is acceptable is the official narrative science. The other stuff can only be found on the dark web because mainstream media refuses to publish it.

So, let us suppose that the good people of France accept that the politicians only have their best interest at heart and they all fall for the mandatory vaccine story…for the greater good. How will they feel when a few years down the line the government decides that all immigrant women need to be sterilised…. for the greater good obviously? Or that the state now owns your body and can harvest human organs for transplant as it sees fit?

Two years ago much of what has come to pass seemed like the stuff of dystopian novels. But the problem with dystopia is the constant temptation to push the misery and suffering just a few notches further for dramatic effect. It’s only a matter of time before some power crazed politician from one of our former democracies suggests removing the thumbs of the unvaxxed. That’ll teach them to do what they’re told won’t it?