TOM EATON |Thabo Mbeki’s fantasies are the stuff of Ig Nobel prizes

The winners of the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize might have been decided earlier this month, but for those who still dream of being awarded science’s oddest accolade there’s always next year, when they can reveal one of South Africa’s greatest ― and silliest ― mysteries: Thabo Mbeki’s time machine.

The Ig Nobels, by their own admission, are fairly silly, recognising research carried out on the fringes of our world, or, in some cases, on the dust mites on the fringes, with the winner in each category walking away with a ten trillion Zimbabwean dollar banknote which, as historical curiosity, is now worth fractionally more than the paper it’s printed on.

Some winners are sillier than others.

This year, for example, the Ig Nobel Peace prize went to researchers who showed that slightly drunk Germans had better pronunciation while speaking Dutch than did sober Germans, suggesting that lowered inhibitions were the key to speaking foreign languages. I remain unconvinced, and, at the risk of offending my ancestors, I would humbly submit that anyone can do a pretty passable Dutch except without liquor simply by choking on a herring while suffering from a sinus infection.

The psychology prize, likewise, seemed a bit pointless this year, as researchers tried to find out what happens when you tell a narcissist that they’re intelligent. I mean, surely Fox News has already answered that question?

To be fair, though, not all of it was silly: the literature award went to one William B. Bean for “persistently recording and analysing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years”, and, while snobs might scoff, I think we can all agree that there are a great many prizewinning literary novels that could have been made far more interesting by the inclusion of decades’ worth of nail clippings.

Of course, grubby, lifeless things that keep coming back no matter what bring me rather elegantly back to the ANC and the aforementioned time machine.

To be clear, Mbeki hasn’t explicitly claimed to have built one; but what else are we to make of his endless whining about the party and its implied claim that he blipped out of our current timeline in about 1994 and only blipped back in once Jacob Zuma was in power?

If only he hadn’t been zipping through rips in the space-time continuum in 2007 he would have seen ‘Alex Mafia’ enter the national lexicon and acted decisively to rein in the creation of predatory fiefdoms high up in his party.

On Sunday he was at it again, telling a gathering in KwaZulu-Natal that the real problem with the ANC was that it “started attracting wrong people” when it took power, the sort of money-grubber who joined up “not to pursue the objectives of the movement but for self-betterment … self-enrichment”.

Ah yes. If only Thabo the Wandering Space Guru hadn’t accidentally catapulted himself into another era back in the day he might have been president in 2005 when the Oilgate and Travelgate scandals broke, empowered to fire the guilty and make it clear that he would not protect insiders or allow the ANC to slide deeper into corruption.

If only he hadn’t been zipping through rips in the space-time continuum in 2007 he would have seen “Alex Mafia” enter the national lexicon and acted decisively to rein in the creation of predatory fiefdoms high up in his party.

Yes, if only we’d had the president Mbeki thinks he was, instead of the doorman for scumbags he actually was, we all might be a lot happier now.

Still, every cloud has a silver lining, and our loss is science’s gain with next year’s Ig Nobel prize ripe for the taking.

And what extraordinary historical and political symmetry it might be, to win a worthless Zimbabwean banknote by researching the self-serving fantasies of Thabo Mbeki …