Everyone is happy that the big man is listening to them

A daily crust and a cup of mead on the saints’ days was all they wanted; none of the Gallic clodhoppers of yore cared a sou how much King Louis spent on himself, his queen and his cronies.

Read more columnists

Throughout history, the peasantry have been perfectly happy for their rulers to blow the better part of the gross national product on themselves or whatever took their fancy at the time. Think old king Cheops (“Will that be one pyramid or three, Mr Pharaoh?”). Think Imelda Marcos and her shoes, or Silvio Berlusconi and his coterie of expensive teenage strumpets. It all adds up, in the addled minds of the great unwashed, to pages in Hello magazine and, therefore, national prestige.

With such a licence for largesse, it’s a piss-poor dictator, prince or demagogue who alienates his or her people to the point that they kick them out of the palace. Louis XVI, Tsar Nicholas and Mobutu Sese Seko all deserved the kickings they got because, while they plundered without conscience, they could have got away with it indefinitely if only they’d played the PR game. Robert Mugabe is still in power and Grace is still shopping for the first team because Bob never fails to remind his people about how Tony Blair is plotting to settle homosexuals on their farms.

The toiling masses don’t understand economics and they don’t understand that the personal enrichment of the few comes at the expense of the many. Until they feel that the strong man isn’t listening to them any more. Then they feel unloved and terribly aggrieved and then they rise up and start building guillotines and other sharp things.

So our big man gets on a helicopter and catches a no-good mayor bunking work. Everyone is happy that the big man is listening to them. But the big man is worrying about how many other underdeveloped dorps and townships are feeling unloved and are going to start putting up barricades so he cleverly announces the Presidential Hotline.

If only Marie Antoinette and Imelda Marcos had been given this advice they would still be shopping for fancy shoes and villas and stuff.

If anyone really believed the Zuma hotline was going to do any good they were either blinkered acolytes or peasants.

Last week the DA announced that the hotline had cost them 572 minutes of important oppositional time without once being answered. The Oppo had a point to prove but the rest of us, who are neither acolytes nor peasants, were never going to waste our time phoning the darn thing.

Off the radar, meanwhile, another hotline has been launched by the government, this one by the ministry of trade and industry. It has a rather narrower focus than the promised presidential panacea; it is for small businesses struggling to get bucks out of the state.

The announcement of the hotline was accompanied by the usual blather about how important small businesses are, about how many jobs they create and how important it is that they get paid.

Minister Rob Davies made the valid point that the Public Finance Management Act “calls for” suppliers to the state sector to be paid within 30 days, but that this was more wishful thinking than reality.

There was something in Davies’s pronouncement that caught this columnist’s rather jaundiced eye: Davies disclosed that his department had asked 760 government and official bodies for the names of those responsible for paying for services and products rendered and that only 512 had responded. In other words, almost a third of those holding the public-service purse strings couldn’t be bothered getting back to their own government.

Imagine, then, how hard it must be for small businesses to find out why they’re waiting 60, 90 or more days for payment.

I’m not going to bother President Zuma about the fact that my neighbours are aliens from an unsavoury galaxy, but I am going to get myself registered for a large Public Works earth-moving contract or two.

Now that I see a government minister talking so candidly about numbers and failings, I have reason to believe that our government bigwigs might be thinking more about paying people for digging holes in the ground than about which 4x4 they’re going to buy.

But, just to be safe, I shall continue building my guillotine.

Personally, I like cake.