GULUVA was listening to a debate the other day on whether the South African Communist Party had the ability and capacity to organise a piss-up in a brewery when news came in that the Reds in Gauteng were planning to roll their tanks towards the Midvaal municipality to expose "corruption and mismanagement of resources" there.

This rare and bold move came after Public Protector Thuli Madonsela had released a scathing report that found the municipality - the only one under Madame Godzille's control in Gauteng - to have breached financial and administrative policies.

The municipality was found not to be as squeaky clean as Madame Godzille had made it out to be when Madonsela also ruled that it had even violated the preferential procurement policy framework.

In response to this, the Reds in Gauteng, led by acting provincial secretary Jacob Mamabolo, said they were formulating a programme of action - which will apparently be finalised on November 24 - to "focus on service delivery and also to ensure that criminal action is taken against any person involved in corruption and maladministration" in that municipality.

Mamabolo also said there was a "misguided and false view" that Midvaal was the best-run municipality in Gauteng.

After the release of the scathing public protector's report, Guluva agrees with the Reds on this one.

But, while we are at it, can Comrade Mamabolo please show us one, just one, well-run municipality in Gauteng, or even in the whole of Mzansi?

Deafening silence

STILL on the issue of Midvaal, it is more than 10 days since the public protector released her report on the municipality and yet we still have not heard from Madame Godzille herself.

Guluva vividly remembers how the madame went around the country in the run-up to the local government elections on May 18, telling anyone who cared to listen how Midvaal was different from corruption-riddled municipalities under the control of Ain't Seen Nothing Yet.

Madame Godzille has been so un-characteristically quiet these days that her silence is now deafening.

Guluva can only hazard a guess as to why this is so. Like her Ain't Seen Nothing Yet counterpart Machine Gun Man, the madame is probably still applying her mind on the report.

Who can blame her, she is only learning from the best.

Tongue twister

THE debt contagion in the euro zone, particularly in the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) countries, is so severe that officials are beginning to suffer from tonguelitis, a highly contagious disease that severs remote communication between the brain and the tongue.

The debilitating disease causes complex tongue twisting movements within the sufferer's mouth and leads him or her to speak in tongues and give people a tongue lashing for no apparent reason.

One of the latest known sufferers of tonguelitis is European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso who, during a talk on the euro zone debt crisis, famously said: "We are indeed now facing a truly systemic crisis that requires an even stronger commitment from all and that may require additional and very important measures."

Before the crisis, a healthy and straight-thinking Barroso would simply have said: "We messed up big time, and now you have to pay."

• Email Guluva on thatha.guluva@gmail.com