Say what you like about Cyril Ramaphosa, but he has his finger on the pulse. Not of the country, of course, but it’s definitely a pulse; possibly a bean or a lentil, or perhaps a mushy pea, being gloomily nudged back and forth across Ramaphosa’s plate as he glumly wonders how different things might have been if someone had explained to him in 2016 that being president would require him to be a president.
This week, as Ramaphosa’s energy utility drew up its plans to ration electricity to 12 hours a day, and the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) confirmed that South Africa’s largest industry is the mass production of illiterate teenagers and people continued to die of cholera less than an hour’s drive from the nation’s capital, the president seized the Ankole by the horns and wrote a newsletter to the nation about how the tourism industry is doing quite well if you don’t count pre-pandemic levels.
Not only were more tourists arriving, wrote Ramaphosa, but they had also spent “more than R25bn in the first quarter of 2023”. (He didn’t go into specifics, but I assume the R25bn was the $50 [R962] note handed as a tip to a waitron at the Raging Armadillo Spur in Polokwane in February.)
His tone, or at least that of his copywriters, was quietly self-satisfied, as if South Africa was wooing foreign visitors with brilliant marketing and organisational skills and not a currency worth fractionally less than the ANC’s word.
Still, as the old saying goes, when God craters a currency, he opens a B&B. The latest figures, Ramaphosa explained, “should strengthen our resolve to ensure tourism becomes one of the biggest drivers of our economic recovery”.
He’s not wrong, of course, but at the risk of sounding like a utopian fantasist, I can’t help wondering if even bigger drivers of our economic recovery might include, oh, I don’t know, having electricity for more than half the day or teaching 10-year-olds how to read.
He’s not wrong, of course, but at the risk of sounding like a utopian fantasist, I can’t help wondering if even bigger drivers of our economic recovery might include, oh, I don’t know, having electricity for more than half the day or teaching 10-year-olds how to read.
Of course, those sunlit uplands are many years in the future and for now we are all at the mercy of our present leadership vacuum, or, if you work at Unisa, a vacuum for leadership.
By now you will have heard of the allegations levelled at that alleged university, including the nugget about the vice-chancellor’s residence claiming R8,000 for lessons on how to use a vacuum cleaner.
This is obviously a fairly dramatic claim, suggesting a failure not only of fiscal oversight but also of the central nervous system. After all, given the average undergraduate engineering degree in South Africa costs about R60,000 per 36-week academic year, paying R8,000 at a similar rate translates into a course of roughly five weeks; and anyone who required five weeks of full-time study to learn how to use a vacuum cleaner is so fundamentally resistant to learning that they shouldn’t be allowed within 100km of a university.
On the other hand, I also have to admit many legitimate universities make a very good and entirely legal living hawking courses so utterly devoid of merit that paying someone R8,000 to show you how to suck dust into a bag feels like pretty good value for money.
Of course, all of this is, er, academic. The media will still winkle out the names of the guilty parties and decide whether VC Puleng LenkaBula was an active participant or simply found herself adrift in a sea of corruption, but at this stage of Hoovergate it’s pretty obvious that nobody taught anybody anything and not just because that’s usually what happens at Unisa.
No, this was simply another expression of our national genius when it comes to theft, a kind of dark creative spark flickering through our society like a drunk, misanthropic fairy magicking up absurd hustles like paying R285,000 for the ratty little net curtains in LenkaBula’s official home or, as we read over the weekend, charging R400,000 to fumigate one ministerial residence three times in three months.
We might have the highest unemployment rate in the world, but there are still a great many of us doing a fair day’s graft for a fair year’s pay, poisoning dead cockroaches for a second time and filing the paperwork to prove it.
It's enough to make this correspondent start moonlighting as a writer of dubious political memoir.
Over the weekend, a certain researcher named Brutus Malada went full “Et Tu?” on Herman Mashaba, plunging a metaphorical knife into the tell it like it is persona of the ActionSA leader by claiming Mashaba had paid pundit Prince Mashele a staggering R12.5m to write The Outsider: The Unauthorised Biography.
To be clear, I don’t believe a word of it. I also don’t believe Malada’s allegations about it. Mashaba’s fans tell me he is a brilliant businessman and only a financial idiot would pay R12.5m for something most biographers would do for R2m. Likewise, his fans insist he is a canny politician, whereas only a naive rube would embark on a project to con the public into believing an authorised puff piece was an objective analysis without buying the complete and permanent silence of his stooges.
Still, it’s given this writer all sorts of ideas. Of course, I’m no Prince Mashele, so how about we start the bidding at R5m?
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