MY family has lured me on holiday under false pretences. The quiet retreat to a remote cabin on an undeveloped stretch of coast has not been the soul-soothing experience as detailed in the brochures; the beds are uncomfortable, the insects relentless in that stinging, biting way of theirs, and the locals jeer rudely when I report the power failures.
Worse still, the kids greeted my suggestion that we search the beaches for cocaine with naked hostility.
So far four barrels of raw coke worth an estimated R68-million have been found washed up near Mossel Bay. Where the stuff came from remains a bit of a mystery, but five will get you ten that a smuggling operation has gone horribly wrong. For more than a week now the speedboat types here have been jabbering on about how the ocean seldom reveals its secrets. Some of them have runny noses and are quite shouty, but there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for that.
And that's been about it as far as holiday excitement goes. The internet here is not so much wobbly as drippy. with small, increasingly intermittent bytes of data squeezing through the void much like a camel passing through the eye of a needle.
Which, I'm told, is perhaps not such a bad thing. The news, when it does get through, is grim. Violence in the Central African Republic is escalating, and thousands of children are being recruited as soldiers. Bombs continue to tear Beirut apart. A teenage gang rape victim in India is burnt to death by her attackers.
Closer to home, the murder of the former Rwandan intelligence chief, Patrick Karegeya, in a luxury Johannesburg hotel on New Year's Eve was an ominous start for a year in which the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide is commemorated.
Karegeya had been living in self-imposed exile in South Africa since 2007 after falling out with President Paul Kagame's lot. He had joined up with Kayumba Nyamwasa, former leader of Rwanda's armed forces, and created the Rwanda National Congress, a broad opposition movement.
After an attempt to kill him in 2010 failed, Karegeya would tell anyone who'd care to listen that hit squads would be sent from Kigali to finish the job because he knew too many of the regime's "dark secrets". As he told The Times of London: "[Kagame] has killed so many people who have gone into exile. It happens on his direct orders. I know too much. First I crossed over into Uganda, but it is so easy to be taken out there, so I made my through Kenya and Tanzania to SA."
Karegeya was perhaps correct when he said he knew too much - he was a ratbag after all. His detractors - who question his sincerity in criticising the Rwandan authorities and stress that he only spoke out against the regime's alleged abuses once he had fallen from favour - have accused him of having a hand in the assassinations of Rwandan opposition figures when he was still a Kagame ally. Some reports have suggested the manner in which he was killed - first poisoned and then strangled - was, ironically, the preferred method of despatching his own enemies.
On the plus side, though, Karegeya appears to have been the life and soul of the party. Those who knew him described him as a plump and jolly sort of spy. He was extremely funny, they said; his jokes were full of sexual innuendo and his double entendres only ever had one meaning.
Meanwhile, and moving from this murky international intrigue, it would appear that a too short chimney at Nkandla now poses the biggest and most glaring threat to the safety of President Jacob Zuma as it is a fire hazard, considering all the thatched roofs in the compound.
I can imagine what the regulars at the Mahogany Ridge would be making of that, given the security cluster group-think that went into fire protection at Nkandla, what with the installation of a reservoir and what appears to be a swimming pool being passed off as a fire pool.
There is, oddly, a suggestion that the too short chimney may not even be a chimney at all but some sort of air filter. The Mail&Guardian, who broke the story about the fire hazard, was muttering something about "the Byzantine complexity that is Nkandla" and filtered air supplies to tunnels beneath the complex that could withstand gas attacks.
One wonders who these people are who would cause our president to fear so for his life. What is the real story here? Does he owe them money, or something? I think we should be told.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
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