A plan to spend R22m on a giant flag has proved conclusively that the ministry of sport, arts and culture is staffed entirely by semi-sentient cabbages that have a deep and burning hatred for both art and culture.
Of course, many artists and cultural practitioners have suspected as much for many years now, as Nathi Mthethwa’s ministry has gone out of its way to encourage creative South Africans to change careers or emigrate.
Tuesday’s story in BusinessTech, however, seemed to provide official confirmation of Mthethwa’s stance.
According to the website, the ministry had “already embarked on a process to conceptualise, design and ultimately install a national monumental flag, with a flagpole that will be more than 100m in height”, which would ultimately become a national landmark and a tourist attraction.
I suppose they’re not wrong. Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even the exclusion zone around Chernobyl was a landmark and a tourist attraction.
But I would humbly submit that there are far cheaper ways to blow the minds of the sort of people who are awed by giant flags. Like, say, letting them chase a laser dot across the lounge floor.
Then again, cost effectiveness isn’t the point of this exercise. BusinessTech suggested that huge flags are “installed by countries to express their identity and pride”, but in this case it would clearly be to allow tenderpreneurs to express six zeroes on the ends of their bank balances.
But I would humbly submit that there are far cheaper ways to blow the minds of the sort of people who are awed by giant flags.
For me, however, it’s not yet another opportunity for graft that leaps off this sordid little story but the staggering stupidity being displayed by a ministry that is, at least in theory, supposed to deal with slightly more lofty thoughts and ideals than the rest.
And I’m not just talking about the stunning lack of imagination involved when all you can think of to represent SA is its flag, or the rather obvious Freudian connotations of sticking a 100m-long pole in the ground in the hope that it makes you feel better about yourself. (I’m tempted to suggest that the flag is little more than a sort of dildo, but of course those give a lot of pleasure to a lot of people, so perhaps that’s not a good comparison.)
I’m not even talking about the fact that if anyone in the ministry had ever read a book, they’d know that there is a direct correlation between the size of nationalist symbols and the crappiness of the countries that erect them.
No, what leaps out of this clown show is a much more fundamental stupidity.
To be clear, I don’t expect anyone in the ministry to know anything about sports, arts or culture. In fact, I’d assume the less you know about those things, the more qualified you are to work for Nathi Mthethwa. But I would have thought they’d know a little bit about politics.
I would have imagined that, when they were called through to the boardroom and told that they had R22m to spend on a feel-good whatwhat, their first instinct would have been to think: what can we do to make people feel more kindly towards the ministry and the ANC?
And yet, instead of going for the obvious bread-and-games options — a lottery giving away hundreds of thousands of tickets to PSL games; a series of free concerts; a highly publicised talent search, identifying 100 aspiring young artists and cultural practitioners who can’t afford tertiary education and then covering their tuitions — it chose a R22m length of fabric, fluttering gently, pointlessly and mockingly in the breeze.
Cabbages, the lot of them.
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