THE real story behind the Dalai Lama's visa application fiasco is still to be told, what with everybody who is supposed to be in the know passing the buck.

THE real story behind the Dalai Lama's visa application fiasco is still to be told, what with everybody who is supposed to be in the know passing the buck.

The Machine Gun Man maintains he is not an immigration official, so it is unfair to ask him visa-related questions.

The Goateed One says he, too, does not work with visas, so the question should be directed to people who have the statutory responsibility to do so.

But the people with the statutory competence to work with visas - the Department of Home Affairs - point in the direction of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, whose spin doctor Clayton Monyela has given so many conflicting accounts of the debacle, including one claiming that the Tibetan spiritual leader's original application was returned to him because it contained a photostat copy of his picture.

Monyela has given the story so many spins over the past week or so that he found himself spinning totally out of control.

This lends credence to an inside story that Guluva has heard.

It is said that when one of the managers in the Department of International Relations and Cooperation received a visa application from an unknown quantity with the unusual name of Jetsun Jamphbel Ngawang Lobsang, he handed it over to a junior clerk who had just joined the department to process, with the curt instruction: "Work on this visa application now."

Keen to impress his manager, the junior official was promptly on his feet. Within minutes he was at the offices of a reputable financial services institution across the road to apply for, guess what, a Visa credit card on behalf of the visa applicant - the same Jetsun Jamphbel Ngawang Lobsang.

A couple of weeks later, managers started getting uneasy questions from top government officials and ministers about the progress of the Dalai Lama's visa application.

But no one could provide the answers because there was no record of the Dalai Lama having applied for one.

While everyone was anxiously waiting for Mzansi's government to provide the answers regarding the Dalai Lama's visa application as his friend Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu's 80th birthday celebrations - to which he had been invited - drew ever so nearer, a Visa credit card issued under the name Jetsun Jamphbel Ngawang Lobsang, the spiritual leader's real name, was apparently already in the post box of his Dharamsala homestead in India.

So, do you, in all honesty, still want to blame China's hold on the Ain't Seen Nothing Yet's government for the bungle of the Dalai Lama's visa application?

Power in a name

GULUVA feels pity for the people of Mvezo.

Instead of basking in the glory of breathing the same air as South Africa's international icon, former president Nelson Mandela, they are being reportedly harassed by his grandson - the powerful Chief Mandla Mandela.

According to the Sunday Times, the strongman of Mvezo is accused of bossing his subjects around, acting like a "god" and treating them like dogs.

This allegedly happened after they protested against his decision to move their family gravesites to make way for a multimillion rand hotel development.

But didn't they know that Mandla had the power and the strength to do as he pleased in his village?

His first name, after all, means "power" or "strength".

Email Guluva on: thatha.guluva@gmail.com