WeeklySA_AdminPOETIC JUSTICE: ‘Innovative’ Lesufi is always full of surprises, even at special provincial funerals
FUN GALORE
with Sy Makaringe
Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi detests going with the flow, sometimes to the frustration of his comrades and the envy of his haters.
The groundbreaking, innovative Gauteng grades 1 and 8 online pupil registration system, which he introduced a few years ago while he was MEC for education, still has to be matched by the other provinces, including the DA-run Western Cape, touted as the best-managed metropolitan council in the entire country.
In 2023, as a freshly minted premier of South Africa’s economic powerhouse, Lesufi paralysed not only opposition parties but his provincial counterparts and even Cabinet ministers when he introduced the Nas’ipani employment programme that gave thousands of jobless youths in Gauteng an important break in life. While his political opponents and detractors were still trying to recover from their paralysis, Lesufi landed another blow to the head with his announcement of a plan to introduce a multi-billion rand high-speed train between Gauteng and rural Limpopo.
Call him a populist whatever you like, Lesufi, who is also chairman of the ANC in the province and a member of the SACP, is his own man and has no master. He defies authority and suffers no fools gladly. So, it was no surprise when, after the ANC, led by President Cyril Ramaphosa, entered into a grand coalition with the DA and other parties, euphemistically referred to as the government of national unity (GNU), the former amateur soccer star dribbled his way in the opposite direction.
He left Helen Zille and his Luthuli House boss Fikile Mbalula completely flummoxed and totally bemused when he excluded the DA from his provincial executive, filling 75% of the seats with his ANC loyalists, even though his party only managed to scrape a meagre 35% of the 2024 vote in the province. Some of his buddies describe him as a man who thinks out of the box.
So, when he was billed to speak at the special provincial funeral of iconic South African gospel musician Solly Moholo in Pretoria last Saturday, many people knew he was going to spring up a surprise or two. And he did not disappoint, just to make a point.
Instead of delivering a eulogy, as his political boss Ramaphosa always does at such high-profile state-sponsored funerals, Lesufi, in the true Panyaza style, gave mourners something completely different. He delivered, wait for it, a urology.
At least that’s what his handsomely paid and highly educated officials wrote on the official part of funeral programme, which must surely have been approved and signed off by him.
Maybe one day Lesufi, the former MEC for education in Gauteng, will tell us what urology, described by scholars as “the branch of medicine that focuses on surgical and medical diseases of the urinary system and the reproductive organs”, has got to do with a special provincial funeral.
WHO’S A TWIT NOW?
It is high time that users of the social media platform X come to terms with the reality that Twitter as a brand was consigned to the trash bin of tech history the moment South African-born US multibillionaire Elon Musk bought the app for $44 billion (R775 billion) two years ago.
Continuing to refer to X as “formerly Twitter” will not help them to move forward or assist the platform to assume a full identity of its own.
It also does not help to still want to interrogate why anyone would name his company X, of all the billion and one names that Musk could have chosen from. Whether he was inspired by the slain American civil rights and religious leader Malcolm X or influenced by the late Pan Africanist Congress activist Benny Alexander a.k.a. !Khoisan X is immaterial now.
The ship has sailed.
So should have the related Twitter terminology, which includes or included words such as tweet (a post or the act of sending a post),Twitterati (users of the app). Twitterature and Twitosphere.
The Exaratti, I guess that’s what the former Twitterati should call themselves now, must just get a life. They must forget about Twitter and start aXing billions of aXes in the Xspace daily until they eXcell at it. Back in 2006 even we thought that the inventors of Twitter – Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams – were just twits.
Just look at them now.
PARTY POOPER
African National Congress leaders, particularly Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula, thought their Jacob Zuma nightmare was over when they heard that his uMkhonto we Sizwe Party was at last going to unveil its constitution in Sandton last week.
That was because they expected MKP to ban dual membership as political parties generally do not allow their members to belong to another party, for obvious reasons. They thought the MKP’s constitution would also forbid dual membership. This would have stopped the self-elected MKP president Zuma from further tormenting them by telling his cheering and ululating hordes of supporters at the party’s packed rallies that he “is still a member of the ANC and will die in the ANC”, even though he is now a fully fledged member of the eight-month-old party.
It would be first time ever that the ever-defiant party wrecker would hlala phansi, abamb’umtheto and shut up, they thought.
How wrong they were!
The MKP’s constitution, widely believed to be the brainchild of national organiser Floyd Shivambu, says nothing of the sort.
Instead, clause 13 of section 5 of the party’s constitution says: “Save for highly exceptional and strategic circumstances and with the approval of the national officials and high command, members of the MKP are not allowed to be members of another political party…” With uBaba having the MKP’s national officials and the party’s so-called high command under the leash, he will invoke “highly exceptional and strategic circumstances” to be allowed to be a member of the ANC, even though the latter party has already expelled him.
uBaba 10, ANC 0.
WHERE’S THE REAL MASHABA?
Still talking about politics, self-elected presidents and dying, will the real Herman Mashaba please stand up?
The Mashaba we know had for the past eight years been consistent about his abhorrence of corruption and his intention to blow the ANC, the source of his pain and anguish, out of existence.
In 2020, at the inception of his new party, ActionSA, which he thought would propel him to the Union Buildings after a three-year test run as the executive mayor of Johannesburg, Mashaba was very categorical when he said: “The ANC cannot save South Africa. If anything, South Africa needs to be saved from the ANC.” His utter disgust at the ANC continued to be evident in 2021, with Mashaba declaring on one occasion: “The ANC is a criminal enterprise. I will never work with the devil.” On his Facebook page the same year, he was emphatic, blurting out: “I am really curious to know HOW those who want to get into bed with the ANC are going to deal with these kinds of issues?
“I will never do such a thing for exactly this reason. Corrupt cadres must voetsek to jail. There can be no compromises!”
In 2023, with the 2024 elections looming un the horizon, and his party’s prospects of winning waning, Mashaba joined the DA-led Multi-Party Charter in another desperate to keep the ANC’s hands away from the cookie jar.
It is not worth repeating that that experiment proved to be an electoral disaster. The parties did not do well either. Now, with political parties such as the DA and Freedom Front Plus expressing the willingness to work with the ANC, the exasperated Mashaba lashed out on Instagram: “Seeing some of the Multi-Party Charter signatories ready to bring the ANC back to power through a coalition government is a betrayal of the South African people.
“We remain committed to being an alternative to the ANC, and this is why we are leaving the MPC.”
The following month, he told the African Times: “I made a commitment to the people of South Africa that I would never work with the ANC because it is a criminal enterprise. I don’t want to associate with such characters. There was just no way that ActionSA would have accepted to be part of this.”
In September he still remained resolute in his stance against the ANC, dismissing rumours that his party was going to form a new coalition government in Tshwane .
“We will never support, nor allow ActionSA, to be used to shield corruption and other forms of abuses, irrespective of whom we get into a coalition with,” he said. This is the Mashaba we know or we knew. Forthright. Resolute. Unrelenting. Blunt. Uncompromising. Abrasive.
So, which Mashaba was seen flanking Panyaza Lesufi, the man who presides over and oversees the ANC’s criminal enterprises in Gauteng, at a media conference on October 9 to announce the formation of a coalition government between ActionSA, ANC and EFF, where the former’s Dr Nasiphi Moya was nominated as the city’s new executive mayor?
Surely it could not have been our Mashaba. This one who currently answers to the name Mashaba is an impostor, a lookalike, an alter ego, his long lost identical twin brother or an identity thief.
A mind-blowing reward to anyone who will find the real Herman Mashaba, dead or alive.
