Old songs sound best

Don't you guys miss the good old days of Msholozi, mara?

Vera certainly does. No, not because of his trademark giggles, his fondness for singing his way out of trouble or his penchant for midnight cabinet reshuffles which were allegedly inspired by curry dinner dates with a family that used to reside at an alleged shebeen in Saxonwold.

No, Vera misses him because things were really simple during his time. One could easily tell the bad guys from the not-so-bad ones.

Under this New Dawn of McBuffalo, everyone seems to have a smallanyana skeleton or two.

Feet of clay

Take the DA, the party that has positioned itself as the Mamelodi Sundowns of fighting corruption in this country. They were the anti-corruption crusaders even ANC cadres ran to at night if they wanted to expose one scandal or another involving powerful ANC chiefs. But these days it looks like DA members may soon be running to the Zondo commission to do an Agrizzi on each other.

Who would have thought that someday a DA mayor, in this case Johannesburg's Herman Mashaba, would accuse former leader Tony Leon of pressuring the DA-led city to give him business?

Kubi kula DA.

Firebrand preacher

In fact, things are so bad over there that that polite lay preacher-turned-politician, Mmusi Maimane, is increasingly sounding like an angry ANC Youth League member (well if you ignore the accent) every time he opens his mouth to speak.

In an interview with PowerFM yesterday, the man once known as the Obama of Soweto was spitting fire, almost turning into a modern-day Malcolm X. He accused white members of the party who want him out for doing badly at the last elections of having "some sort of domestic worker relationship where they can tell me when to come and go".

Sauce for goose, sauce for gander

He wasn't done. He further accused the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) - which some of Vera's friends at her local hair salon mistakenly call the Institute of Racism - of having a "patronising, supremacist approach that is dangerous".

Preach moruti, preach! Vera heard herself shouting as the DA leader spoke. But then she remembered that it was the same Maimane who was chastising Patricia de Lille for "playing the race card" when she was fighting a powerful cabal within the party that wanted her out.

The shoe is now on the other foot, moruti wa DA.

Dodging the bullet

Speaking of De Lille. Remember the time when the DA said she had contravened its constitution and "fired herself" when she said in a 702 Radio interview that she was ready to dump the party?

Well this week Mashaba nearly got himself in trouble when asked if he would leave the party if the IRR and former leader Helen Zille succeeded in their "takeover" bid.

Mr Black Like Me stopped just short of saying he will leave the party. Vera isn't sure if that was because the Pretoria-raised madala is street-smart or if it was the thought of having to wear red overalls and makarapa every day when he goes to work that stopped him from saying he'd jump to his beloved EFF.

Road to perdition

Vera has it on good authority that one Mzwandile Masina has ambitions to be president. She just hopes that by the time he does so, the ANC would have taken him on an economics refresher class to remind him why closing down one's ports is the shortest route to radical economic ruins.