LAST Sunday, President Jacob Zuma told guests at his official Pretoria residence that South Africans were lazy and immigrants seemed to work harder, and that there was basically no difference between public funds spent on his home at Nkandla and the George airport, which he claimed had been built to suit former president PW Botha.
These remarks were apparently made off-the-cuff. Zuma has been known to do this from time to time and some commentators have suggested that, for all their idiocy, these unscripted offerings nevertheless offer interesting insights into the President's thinking. Here at the Mahogany Ridge we regard that as an overly generous assessment of a situation in which the man has once again just blurted out the first thing that came to his head.
His audience in this case was a group of senior journalists, and the occasion was the commemoration of Black Wednesday - October 19, 1977 - when the apartheid government shut down The World and Weekend World newspapers.
Which is perhaps why, in another off-the-cuff guff, Zuma declared that if he were a reporter he would write to South Africans to say, "Wake up."
It was a baffling admission. Why should they wake up? Wouldn't they already be awake if they were reading the newspaper? What's happening? What are they missing? The coffee's ready? Time for work? The bed's on fire?
These are the sort of details that newspaper readers would expect in a report that urged them to wake up. Perhaps senior journalists don't like to work on Sundays, but I can't help feeling that they let the side down a bit by not pressing the big guy for wee bit more information.
The thing is, if I were Jacob Zuma's news editor, I'd have none of this wake-up nonsense. It's a rubbish idea for a news story. What I'd do instead is send him off to Oudsthoorn where it so happens a rather interesting situation is unfolding.
First, though, I'd need to give Zuma a backgrounder. I'd have to speak slowly and choose my words carefully. I may even need to repeat myself several times. This is because the conflict in Oudsthoorn is very complex and almost beyond comprehension.
In by-elections in August last year, the ANC lost its majority in the Oudsthoorn municipality. Since then they've refused to relinquish power, and have, according to Western Cape Premier Helen Zille, "been spending ratepayers' money hand-over-fist in filibustering court cases to stay in control." The party has bled the town dry, and allegedly even siphoned off R16m from the Cango Caves trust account into municipal coffers.
The court cases have however not gone well for the ANC and the Oudsthoorn speaker, John Stoffels, has been ordered to personally pay the costs of the legal actions because he had apparently refused to convene council meetings to avoid motions of no confidence against the ruling party.
The ANC have now resorted to suspending DA councillors on absenteeism charges in order to cling to a majority, and are clearly hanging on like bokdrolle, as they say in that part of the world, until the 2016 local government elections.
Backgrounder over, I'd now direct Zuma to seek out the town's acting director of corporate services, one Francois Human, who has been compiling dossiers of the activities of his colleagues in the ANC, including incidents of corruption, bribery and intimidation, among other things, and has forwarded them to various political leaders, the SA Revenue Services, the Special Investigations Unit and, because they need to look busy from time to time, the SA Police Service.
The allegations in these dossiers are quite serious. For instance, a consultancy company was paid R14m but no-one knows what for exactly. Then again, this is common with consultants. The mayor has also allegedly been involved in various land transactions using his daughter as a proxy with service providers. Some Kruger Rands have gone missing, and the acting municipal manager, it is claimed, has been parcelling out large chunks of cash to various ANC regional government officials.
But what I'd like Zuma to get to the bottom of is this: Human has detailed a number of "braais, orgies, booze and sex parties" in Cape Town and in Gauteng where high class prostitutes were flown in from all over the country for "the entertainment and enjoyment of all".
For these "lavish indulgences" - as the Justice and Equality Front put it - the municipality was invoiced R28 000 for "legal services".
This is seriously wrong, I'd tell my reporter. Braais, orgies, booze, sex parties with high-end call girls? All for R28 000? That's so cheap, it's like the 1994 rates.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus
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