Ramaphosa is a hot mess. Medupi, under construction since 2007, was finished this week and then promptly blew up. I need some entertainment. Thank heavens, then, for Dr Iqbal Survé, entering the circus tent from stage left, squirting journalistic stool-water out of a fake flower.
Early on Thursday afternoon, Survé tweeted a link to an IOL “news” report entitled “‘Missing’ triplets mystery for father”, commenting: “Great investigation work by Sizwe Dlamini and his investigations team.”
Survé doesn’t tweet often, which is why, when he does, people sit up and take notice, sometimes even a dozen at a time. When I found his tweet, two hours after he’d posted it, it had been retweeted nine times and liked a massive 12 times.
In case you weren’t one of those 12 people, let me tell you what you missed. But first, I must remind you how we got here.
Once upon a time, a thoroughly disgraced former journalist called Piet Rampedi discovered that a Tembisa woman was about to give birth to an opportunity to sell more newspapers.
Opportunism turned into claims of octuplets, which turned into fantasies of decuplets, which turned into one of the most transparently obvious media frauds in recent memory, which finally turned into the only thing it could: conspiracy theory.
No sooner had the rubes been exposed for their ham-fisted buffoonery than they were invoking giant plots, with Rampedi yell-tweeting that “we are dealing with something bigger here. A grand conspiracy. A cover up. Unprecedented stuff.”
Surprisingly, not everyone was convinced, and when energy expert Chris Yelland tweeted that it would soon be time for “serious legal action against fraudsters @pietrampedi, @IqbalSurve, @IOL and @pretorianews”, Iqbal was incensed, doubling down with yet more conspiracy.
“Chris,” he replied, “you and your media friends are complicit in hiding the abuse of this mother by the state. I hope the mother institutes criminal charges and sues for damages against all of you. Pin this tweet.”
The trouble, however, with being exposed as a fake in the internet age is that your incompetence and fakery tend to linger in Google searches.
Well, I don’t need to tell you that two months later, none of this has gone anywhere, because it was always a fiction, because Rampedi isn’t a journalist and Survé is just a guy who’s borrowed billions from pensioners to pretend that he’s a media baron.
The trouble, however, with being exposed as a fake in the internet age is that your incompetence and fakery tend to linger in Google searches. Which is why, these days, the best thing your average con man can do after being caught in a lie is to bombard the internet with fresh or different information that will obscure his previous mess.
Which brings us to Thursday’s scoop.
According to IOL’s “investigations team”, a certain Qriquas Mzolo is struggling to find the triplets he claimed he fathered with a certain Maria Moliehi Sithole — the same Maria Moliehi Sithole who, back in June, was the victim of that cabal of baby-snatching, mother-tormenting journalists and politicians Piet and Iqbal warned us about.
Of the decuplets, however, there is almost no mention, except that the father seems to have become suspicious after meeting a social worker who had “approached him after reading about Sithole’s decuplets story”.
In other words, thanks to the passage of time, the fantastically low expectations of IOL readers, and some writerly sleight of hand, Piet Rampedi’s decuplets story is now very much Sithole’s decuplets story.
More importantly, “Sithole’s decuplets story” is now merely a single phrase in a grand new narrative: Sithole is now the mother not of fictitious decuplets but “missing” triplets, a story that is suddenly slightly more plausible and which, if repeated often enough, will gradually replace those ludicrous decuplets in the collective memory of the internet — and in the so-called minds of Rampedi’s readers.
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