If you thought Enoch Godongwana’s mini budget was a bit of a party pooper, consider Wednesday’s startling news that the SANDF has confiscated 25-million erections.
At least, I think it was 25 million. According to DefenceWeb, SA troops have seized R223m worth of Cobra erectile dysfunction pills on our border with Mozambique, which, at about R9 per pill (a very rough average of the prices I found on Takealot and adult online store Naughty n Nice), works out to about 25-million erections.
It’s entirely possible that the bust was the culmination of hard work and good intelligence, and if it’s all legit, then I’m glad that the army is protecting our turf. But given that this is the same SANDF that tried to import an untested and clearly dodgy Covid drug from Cuba in 2020, and then tried to cover it up, we can’t rule out the theoretical possibility that the SANDF was simply protecting its own turf, stamping out rival smugglers as it prepares to fly in five Dakota-loads of penis pills from Cuba called something like El Mucho Macho Matador.
Speaking of loads of overpriced, B-grade stiffs brings me surprisingly elegantly back to parliament, which listened to Godongwana’s speech on Wednesday with the polite, detached air you’d expect from people who aren’t really affected by the country’s economic collapse.
Then again, perhaps what I saw as detachment was instead a look of growing panic, as MPs learnt that the state will be taking on up to R266bn of Eskom’s debt, a sum so vast they will have to spend the rest of the week having it explaining to them in terms they can understand, for example, 266,000km of border fence as installed by Patricia de Lille, 617 times what Panyaza Lesufi spent on sort of sanitising Gauteng’s schools, or 133 VBS banks.
Holy penny pinching, Batman! You mean SOEs won’t just be handed billions of rands without any conditions? What is this, a dictatorship run by forensic accountants?!
It’s also possible they were looking shell-shocked because of another Godongwana bombshell: according to the finance minister, “funding to SOEs will now come with strict pre- and post-conditions”. Holy penny pinching, Batman! You mean SOEs won’t just be handed billions of rand without any conditions? What is this, a dictatorship run by forensic accountants?!
The biggest shock of all, however, was reserved for you and me, and came in the very next sentence, as Godongwana explained: “Preconditions mean that SOEs will need to comply with these conditions before they receive government support, not after. Non-compliance to conditions means no funding.”
Yes, dear reader, 28 years into democracy, a whole finance minister had to explain to the people allegedly running this country that a precondition is a precondition, and that non-compliance means non-compliance, and that if you can’t be trusted with large sums of money, you probably can’t be trusted with large sums of money.
Talk about electile dysfunction ...
