WeeklySA_AdminHE ZAPPED IT: Leader of one-percent party Rise Mzansi shows other MPs how it’s done
IN HIS reply to the State of the Nation Address (SONA) debate in Parliament last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa chastised MPs for not coming up with concrete proposals that would assist the country to move forward and deal decisively with, in particular, the negative energy that ultra right-wingers and white supremacists like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, among others, were bringing to bear on South Africa.
He had in his gun sights a number of MPs, including the usual suspect, EFF’s Julius Malema, and Johnny Come Lately John Hlophe, the former Western Cape judge president who had spent an inordinate amount of precious parliamentary time worshipping his demigod and leader of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma.
Refreshingly, the exception was Songezo Zibi, who made his debut in parliament as the leader of Rise Mzansi.
Hlophe’s speech was so dreadful that even Zuma criticised it. It also ended in fisticuffs between Hlophe and his Chief Whip, Mzwanele Manyi, in the party’s caucus.
As a former newspaper editor, Zibi knows how of essence time and space are and how to use words efficiently and effectively. As a result, his maiden SONA contribution was concise, condensed, crisp, short, sweet, simple, precise and to the point.
The outstanding way in which Zibi zapped his input in the limited time allocated to him reminded one of the 1980s’ nationwide environmental awareness campaign that encouraged anti-littering in townships using the slogan “Zap it in the Zibi Can”.
Zibi really zapped in parliament.
DIVERSITY GONE WRONG
AT A time when US President Donald Trump and his filthy (pardon the word) rich friend Elon Musk are spitting venom at South Africa for its transformative agenda, it is so pleasing to watch our previously and still advantaged fellow citizens making efforts to embrace cultural and racial diversity in our country.
Insurer DotSure is among those companies that need to be applauded for doing their bit to promote oneness among South Africa’s diverse peoples.
Its advertising copywriters have demonstrated this in a TV commercial in which a white lady (race reference used solely for context) brags to a friend about how she has, through DotSure, secured a great future for her Enzo, short for Enzokuhle, a Zulu name given to males, meaning “Do Good Things”. So far so good! But the trouble is, in the next and last frame of the commercial, her Enzo turns out not to be a black hunk, but a dog.
Not sure, DotSure? Then don’t.
DEI VERSUS DIE
WHILE still on the issue of diversity and Donald J Trump, many people around the world might not have considered the strong possibility that the 45th and 47th president of the United States might actually be dyslexic.
Who makes such rash and illogical decisions that Trump has made since coming into office unless they suffer from, as experts put it, “a condition of neurodevelopmental origin that mainly affects the ease with which a person reads, writes and spells” and/or has exhibited “difficulties in phonological awareness, verbal memory and verbal processing speed”?
sSo, when Trump did away with the DEI in one of his executive orders, for example, it was probably not necessarily because of the diversity, equity and inclusion the acronym it stands for, but because he read the acronym as DIE.
It is patently clear that Trump does not want to DIE; all he wants is to be President of the United States, hence his ill-advisedly expunging the acronym DEI from the US government lexicon.
WHAT’S FOR BREAKFAST?
IT is interesting that, out of all skilful negotiators the United States has been bequeathed with, President Donald Trump would choose one Keith Kellogg as his special envoy to Ukraine and Russia to oversee peace negotiations between the two warring nations.
As predicted, Kellogg, a former US army lieutenant-general and presidential security adviser, soon found himself thrust into a highly delicate and combustible space that would change every minute.
It had been so stressful for him that when one second he thought he was in control of the situation, his boss would not only blindside him but go over him to grovel to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and badmouth his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The worst was when Kellogg was caught in crossfire of a sharp war of words between Trump and Zelenskyy that left him completely paralysed and forced to beg the Ukrainian loose cannon not to insult his boss.
At this rate, and if this 80-year-old son of wealthy US cereal entrepreneur WC Kellogg doesn’t get a grip pretty soon, both the Russians and the Ukrainians will eat him for breakfast.
ELON WHATEVER
IT IS mind-boggling why Americans still have not yet figured out what is brewing in their country since Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20 for his second nonconsecutive term, even though the red flags are all there for everyone to see.
South African-born Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, has emerged as the most powerful personality in the US today thanks to Donald Trump.
He has free reign in everything. He has shown disrespect for Trump by turning up at a press conference at the Oval Office with his four-year-old son, X, in tow.
He is dipping his fingers everywhere, especially where there is money. He has taken over the government’s payment systems and now wants to access personal tax data at the Internal Revenue Service.
He also seeks to open up Fort Knox, the government’s gold reserve, ostensibly to conduct an audit of the gold stored there, something that has not been done in the facility in 50 years.
Even Trump himself does not know what Musk’s job is. He has not given him an official job title or description; he is too scared to even try.
When Trump was asked by journalists to define Musk’s official job title during a Fox News TV interview at which the multibillionaire was also present, the president said: “Elon is, to me, a patriot. So, you know, you could call him a consultant, you could call him whatever you want.” Musk himself was forthright and to the point. He told reporters that he saw himself and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that he heads as “presidential enforcers”.
Some people call what is unfolding a power grab. Others see it as the disruption of democracy by Musk and his “super geniuses”. We in South Africa know what it is. It is called State Capture.
FACT-CHECKING MANYI
“IN the past financial year we have lost something to the tune of 139 million people that have been thrown into poverty.” – uMkhonto weSizwe Parliamentary Chief Whip Mzwanele Manyi commenting on the performance of the Government of National Unity (GNU) on Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh’s SMWX podcast.
THE FACTS: By mid-2024, South Africa’s population had surpassed the 63-million mark after increasing by 835 513 people (or 1,33%) over the previous period, according to Statistics South Africa. Then figure mentioned by Manyi is more than double South Africa’s total population.
FACT CHECK
NO BADGE OF HONOUR FOR MALEMA
“I’M so happy to be an international criminal, you know why, because Nelson Mandela was an international criminal. That’s what they declared him for fighting for the freedom of our people. And if it means I’m joining in the ranks of Nelson Mandela by being declared an international criminal for fighting for the rights of my people, I am a proud international criminal.”
This is what EFF leader Julius Malema said while delivering his keynote address at the St Paul African Apostolic Church in Soweto last Sunday. About a week earlier Elon Musk, South African-born US multibillionaire and head of the Donald Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had on his social media platform X called for “[i]mmediate sanctions for Malema and declaration of him as an international criminal”.
The spat came in the wake of a fallout between Trump and the South African government following the signing of the Expropriation Bill into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa.
But Malema had got it all completely wrong: former President Mandela was never branded “an international criminal”, not least by the US government.
THE FACTS: In January 1989, the US’s Defence Department published a 130-page official government document titled Terrorist Group Profiles in which it named the ANC among 52 of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups”. It cited Mandela as part of the then banned anti-apartheid organisation’s leadership. This happened at the time he was serving a life sentence on Robben Island after he was convicted of sabotage. Mandela and other ANC leaders remained on the US government’s terror watch list even after he was democratically elected as president of South Africa in 1994. The term terrorist in reference to Mandela and other ANC leaders was dropped in 2008 through a bill passed by both houses of the US Congress and signed by President George W Bush.
There is a vast difference between the words “terrorist” and “criminal”. Some English dictionaries describe a terrorist as “someone who uses violent action, or threats of violent action, for political purposes” and terrorism as “the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to inculcate fear”.
By contrast, a criminal is described simply as “a person who commits a crime”.
