IF you blinked you probably missed it, but on Wednesday there was another unsurprising little moment in the ongoing Nkandla saga. Catherine Mabuza, who chairs Parliament's public works portfolio committee, blocked discussion on Public Protector Thuli Madonsela's investigation into President Jacob Zuma's home.
It was all rather predictable - but it did remind me of a trip I took to China some years back to see the changes brought about by Beijing's policy of economic pragmatism and the mad desire to sling up more skyscrapers than the rest of the world put together.
Despite the novel shininess, there were still pronounced traces of the old authoritarianism, and in Xi'an, the heavily polluted capital of Shaanxi province, the hotel rules no doubt echoed the hard-line dogmatism of this earlier era. Under no circumstances were guests to dry their laundry on the television sets. It was forbidden to store radioactive materials in the rooms, and gambling and prostitution were not allowed after 11pm.
This put paid to my leisure plans, and so I duly trekked off to the nearest World Heritage Site - the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, who reigned as the first emperor of a unified China from 221BC to 210BC.
Qin was a chronic over-achiever, and the projects undertaken in his lifetime included parts of the Great Wall, a national road system, and the life-sized Terracotta Army that guarded his mausoleum. He also, in the interests of stability, banned many books and buried scholars alive.
The stabiliy, such as it was, ended with his death, and the Qin dynasty collapsed amid messy civil wars. It was all very well having an army of statues to protect you in the afterlife. But issuing the "soldiers" with some 40 000 real bronze weapons? When the peasants revolted, they knew exactly where to go to arm themselves.
Anyway, back to Nkandla - which I'm now tempted to think of as the local equivalent of Qin's final resting place. Zuma's home, admittedly, is a fraction of the size of Qin's spot, which, if I'm not mistaken, is the world's largest underground mausoleum. It took 38 years to build and has an outer circumference of 6.3 kilometres. But as hubristic gestures go, Nkandla matches it brick for brick.
I'm not quite sure what will become of the place once Zuma has disappeared from our lives. Perhaps Madonsela has some suggestions. She has after all revealed to parliament's justice and constitutional development committee that her investigation into the R200-million security upgrade there was one her speediest cases yet.
And speaking of speed, it could all be over sooner than we think. The DA's Helen Zille has been coming across as some sort of Mayan oracle lately, warning about "catalytic moments" in the political landscape that signal not only an increasing torpor or paralysis within the ANC, but even its death as the party turns on itself. "The ANC is a dying party," she said. "A wounded animal is always the most dangerous. In the next 10 years, we'll see just how vicious it can be."
Given that we're about to see the ANC starting to eat one another, perhaps Nkandla could become a fat farm. This is eminently sensible and quite in keeping with the current fashion towards more empathetic treatment of the morbidly obese.
In the UK, in what appears to be a flabby backlash against speaking plainly to patients - the sort of thing they tell smokers; that, no ifs and buts, the cigarettes are killing them - doctors have instead been urged to watch what they say when dealing with the overweight and to refrain from blaming people for being fat. Those who feel judged by doctors, according to new health guidelines, are less likely to come in for treatment.
But we seldom listen to doctors, anyway - and we probably won't be paying much attention to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) who recently warned of grim conditions in Central African Republic and of unprecedented levels of violence there. In renewed fighting, tens of thousands of people have been displaced as armed groups and government forces engage one another in combat.
According to MSF, more than 80% of the surgeries it has carried out in the war-torn region were for conflict-related injuries - "largely gunshot and machete wounds". The organisation's SA spokeswoman, Kate Ribet, told reporters, "We are treating people for horrific violence-related injuries, including women and children, as well as witnessing burnt villages and appalling scenes of murder soon after attacks have taken place."
Both France and SA agreed that an interventionist force is needed but, if we're to send our troops back up there, they should at least know that it's no picnic.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
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