POLL | Choose your Mampara of the Year

Dear reader, here's another opportunity to choose that one person who's behaviour amounted to outstanding buffoonery, Old Hog has made things easy for you by shortlisting the best clowns 2024 had to offer. 

JABULANI KHUMALO

Political novice Jabulani Khumalo completes the top five. This upstart was dribbled by the Nkandla Crooner and thought he was the real leader and owner of the MK Party.

Zuma had sent him to the IEC to register the party with Khumalo as leader, a ploy to confuse the head honchos at Luthuli house.

Then Zuma kicked him out a few months later. When the MKP amassed more than two million votes, Khumalo rushed to court, claiming the party was his. The court threw out every application he made, appeal after appeal.

NOSIVIWE MAPISA-NQAKULA

This mampara was the first speaker of the National Assembly to be arrested while in office — for corruption allegations.

Upon her arrest, she told the court that she could not be treated like any other criminal — insinuating that she deserved special treatment.

Her case has not been concluded. But her behaviour in court suggested that there should be one set of rules for the powerful and another for the rest of society. That, in our book, is mampara conduct.

JOHN STEENHUISEN

First up is the leader the blue party, the Desperate Alliance’s John Steenhuisen.

He featured three times this year as mampara of the week — in February, April and September, for many foot-in-mouth episodes. Desperate for votes in Gauteng during the election campaign, Steenhuisen branded premier Panyaza Lesufi’s crime prevention wardens' “drunkards” recruited from shebeens and handed “ill-fitting Pep Stores uniforms”.

In April Steenhuisen sought to revive Jan van Riebeeck's almond hedge separating the Cape from the rest of South Africa, asking why opposition parties — “mercenaries” he called them — were “coming here to an economy that is working”, to loot. He was at it again in September, when he stunned the country by appointing “racist” podcaster Roman Cabanac as his chief of staff.

GAYTON MCKENZIE

Steenhuisen is neck and neck with Gayton McKenzie, the minister of sports, arts & culture, who is also the leader of the Patriotic Alliance.

In April McMampara demonstrated how tone deaf and unmeasured he is when he almost caused public violence at a live eNCA debate — on the state of gangsterism on the Cape flats — over ill-considered remarks on Palestine. In July, shortly after his cabinet appointment, the excitable minister threatened to reveal the list of artists who had “unfairly” benefited from public funds.

But this buffoon was left with egg on his face when it emerged that the list he published was of beneficiaries of a Covid relief programme that assisted artists who were out of work during lockdown.

BONGINKOSI KHANYILE

And then there's the MK Party's Bonginkosi Khanyile, who once claimed that “the more you go to school, the more your brain becomes small”.

He earned the mampara of the week accolade twice this year, first in March when he accused Springbok captain Siya Kolisi of betraying black people by donning the green and gold.

The MK Party's blabbermouth took the award again in July for his verbal diarrhoea when reacting to an electoral court judgment that fined him R150,000, suspended for five years, for breaching electoral laws, and said he would appeal.

VISVIN REDDY

And then there's Khanyile's elder, Visvin Reddy, the MKP KwaZulu-Natal leader who is also now an MP. Reddy displayed how backward and primitive he is by threatening civil war in March when there was doubt that his party would make it the ballot paper.

“We are sending a loud and clear message that if these courts, which are sometimes captured, if they stop MK, there will be anarchy in this country.

There will be riots like you've never seen in this country, there’ll be no election. No South African will go the polls if MK is not on the ballot paper,” screamed the madman.

RENALDO GOUWS

The DA has since cut ties with mampara Gouws following revelations of his old racist statements.

Back then, when Gouws earned the mampara title, he had issued a non-apology that advised those offended to “please drink a Panado for the chest pains”.

Thank God this mampara was removed from our parliament and now stands a good chance of becoming Mampara of the Year.

ROMAN CABANAC

This mampara is currently defying an instruction from his boss, John Steenhuisen, to resign from his position as chief of staff. Cabanac was asked to leave government after his racist and homophobic statements were made public.

But like the mampara that he is, Cabanac is holding on. Steenhuisen told this newspaper that he is frustrated by the mampara's defiance.

Cabanac might just add more frustration by snatching the mampara of the Year award from his boss.

BUSISIWE MKHWEBANE 

After losing almost every case against her in court this legal illiterate went on to blame her problems on “key figures of Indian descent”. When the Supreme Court of Appeals  ruled against her in a case related to her impeachment last year as public protector (read destroyer), this buffoon resorted to hurling racial slurs. 

KABELO GWAMANDA

Gwamanda's alleged victims claim he smooth-talked them to investing in his funeral policy scam.

They were later shocked to see him appearing on TV as mayor of Johannesburg. He has since been arrested, but remains a strong contender for Mampara of the Year for fooling all of us into believing he was a law-abiding citizen.  

To vote for your Mampara of the Year visit www.timeslive.co.za