A FAMOUS GROUSE

THE accuracy of any “exclusive” report in a Sunday newspaper can, I believe, be determined by the nature of the official reaction to said report. This invariably appears on the Monday or the Tuesday and the more blustery and splenetic the response, the more reliable or factual the contents of the story in question. Call it the Bleating Goat Principle.

And so it was with the science, technology and innovation department’s outraged comments concerning two recent City Press reports which, it’s claimed, are yet more examples of attempts to tarnish the image of the minister concerned, Blade Nzimande.

Monday’s statement, issued by departmental spokesman Veli Mbele, is typically hysterical and stuffed with the customary broadsides reporters are subjected to at such times: “outright lies”, “innuendo”, “the worst of gutter journalism”, “false accusations”, “useful idiots”, “nameless sources”, “deliberately malicious”, “scurrilous” … on and on it goes, the howling of an aggrieved ministerial flunky. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Nzimande was no better. The former higher education and training minister was quoted as saying, “I remain unfazed and unshaken by the latest lame and devious attempts by the Media24 group to tarnish my name and dismiss both these articles as nothing else but StratCom type hogwash that is calculated to whip up public outrage against me and perpetuate a racist Media24 smear campaign that weaponises allegations against Black political figures and especially communists.”

Typical of such outbursts, however, is a general vagueness about whatever it is that prompted such indignation in the first place. Nowhere, for example, is there any mention of rabbits.

On Sunday, City Press reported on a forensic investigation into the affairs of the higher education and training department’s National Skills Fund. This investigation, carried out by Nexus Forensic Services, “found evidence of fraud, forgery and nondelivery of services by companies, even though they had been paid”.

The 521-page Nexus report kicks off, the newspaper said, with claims that R123-million was set aside “to buy 10 500 rabbits”. Instead, only 200 rabbits were purchased “with the rest of the money unaccounted for”.

It appears that a family-owned operation, the Yikhonolakho Women and Youth Primary Cooperative, was awarded this sum of money for a “Rabbit Value Chain”, a project to train 250 students from KwaZulu-Natal in “rabbit-breeding skills”. Rabbit meat was to be exported for commercial purposes.

First off, R123-million for 10 500 rabbits does seem a bit steep. That’s almost R12 000 a bunny. But maybe they’re a special sort of rabbit, so special that, if they were buffalo, there would be a home for them down Phala Phala way.

More importantly, as the experts here at the Slaughtered Lamb (“Finest Ales & Pies”) point out, since when did rabbits ever need assistance, least of all from students, when it came to breeding? 

Experience has shown that these creatures have an innate flair for this sort of thing.

Female rabbits, or does, come into season more than ten times a year and can have litters almost constantly throughout their lives. A sexually mature buck can mate any time, and invariably does so quite pronto. 

According to one informed source, “The male rabbit will chase the doe and sniff, lick, and nuzzle her. They’ll groom each other and the male rabbit may urinate on the female. If the doe is receptive, an experienced male rabbit will mate with the female within seconds to minutes of being introduced.”

I mention this Trumpish behaviour only to point out that the Yikhonolakho Women and Youth Primary Cooperative may have deemed an initial outlay of 10 500 rabbits a bit too unwieldy for training purposes. 

This works out at 42 rabbits per student. I doubt even experienced and professional rabbit wranglers can cope with that number. Two hundred rabbits for 250 students seems about right, allowing as it does for a 20 per cent incidence of leporiphobia and other fears about wildlife that may trouble a potential rabbit breeder. 

Besides which, and speaking of, with 200 rabbits going at each other like, uh, rabbits, well, you’d soon have thousands of the little buggers hopping about the place, not so? A start-up with 10 500 of these creatures is obviously unnecessary.

What intrigues, though, is that somewhere in all of this was the idea that it would be profitable to export rabbit meat. As if other countries couldn’t breed their own rabbits. The whole scheme smacks of committee processes and lazy groupthink. Little wonder then that communists like Nzimande would be interested in such an enterprise. Next thing would be sheep, one presumes.

Democracy in the doldrums

A recent report by the polling firm Afrobarometer suggests that support for democracy is falling in Africa amid a background of coups, corruption and maladministration, and that 53 per cent of Africans would accept a military dictatorship if their elected leaders used their positions only to enrich themselves.

Surveys conducted in 2021 and 2023 for Afrobarometer’s African Insights 2024 study found a seven per cent drop in the preference for democracy from the previous decade.

The good news, though, is that, according to the report, support for democracy remains “robust” on average in 39 countries, with 66 per cent of Africans preferring democracy over any other system of government. Some 80 per cent reject one-man rule, 78 per cent one-party rule and 66 per cent military rule.

The bad news is … well, South Africa.

The softening of attitudes towards juntas and military rule, the result of failures by elected governments to improve the lives of citizens, is common in West Africa, the continent’s so-called “coup belt”. That sort of behaviour, we may sniff, with generals going tonto on everyone’s backside is de rigueur up there in the sand dunes.

But we’re not supposed to be like that. South Africa, according to a report in The Times, is regarded as one of the continent’s “flagship democracies” and is “much admired”. Yet it was one of the countries in which less than half of those surveyed preferred democracy to other forms of rule. 

In fact, South Africa’s drop in support for democracy was the steepest on the continent, with the proportion for those agreeing that “democracy is preferable to any other kind of government” falling by 29 percentage points to 43 per cent over the past decade.

This was, of course, largely in the era of Jacob Zuma, and it could well be argued that we have yet to experience the full effect of Convict Number One’s toxic rule. Those particular chickens are still finding their way home to roost, if we may put it that way.

The ANC did see fit to expel this corrupt duffer at the weekend for having “actively impugned” the integrity of the organisation by campaigning for the rival Umkhonto we Sizwe Party in the elections. But no mention, of course, of how Zuma had impugned the ANC’s reputation through state capture — and in the process sullied the democratic experience for millions of South Africans.

Sadly, any optimism that we may have felt with Cyril Ramaphosa’s installation as president in 2018 — the so-called Peter Bruce Rapture — has now effectively been reversed. 

It is concerning that, according to Afrobarometer’s South African “democracy scorecard”, just 35 per cent of those surveyed felt that the armed forces “should never intervene in politics”.

It’s perhaps obvious that those respondents who differed in this respect clearly have no experience of life in a military dictatorship. The closest South Africa came to that would have been in the late 1980s, when PW Botha, Magnus Malan and Adriaan Vlok unleashed their “security cluster” on the mass democratic movement. Many of those if the militant tendency, like the EFF’s Julius Malema, were not yet toilet-trained in those turbulent years.

It is a small mercy, then, that the SANDF is presently not capable of mounting any form of intervention in the country’s political affairs. 

In fact, rather than prosecute those people running the Milites Dei Academy, the private “security training facility” in White River, Mpumalanga, where some 95 Libyan nationals had been “square-bashed” and trained up for some feared conflict in the north, the authorities should get them to knock our own troops into shape. But that is perhaps a matter for another day.

South Africa’s anti-democratic lurch, meanwhile, continues apace. In this regard, we remain glaringly out-of-step with the rest of the civilised world. Latest national embarrassment is the verdict by monitors that included all the usual suspects — members of the ANC, the SA Communist Party, Cosatu and the Congress of Traditional Leaders of SA, among others — that Sunday’s presidential elections in Venezuela had been free, fair and transparent. As they put it in a statement:

“The observers condemn and dispel allegations of fraud by the Reuters media group reporting on the elections taking place in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela without actually being present. Claims or allegations of fraud have been found to be baseless and mischievous with Venezuela’s electoral system considered one of the best in the world…

“We welcome President Nicolás Maduro’s commitment to recognise the presidential election result regardless of the outcome. We urge other candidates to also publicly declare the same.”

Words, no doubt, that will soon be coming back to haunt these idiots. Protests in Caracas and elsewhere against Maduro’s criminal power grab are mounting. So too is international outrage. This is a situation where support for democracy is reassuringly on the rise.