Politics can be highly entertaining. This is especially true in a country like ours where weird political developments happen almost daily.
One night you go to bed with Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla egowisha – in social media isiXhosa – throwing an F-bomb at Floyd Shivambu before calling the MK Party secretary-general a mafikizolo who is “the worst thing that happened” to the party.
The next you wake up to read that she has written: “They will expel me tomorrow… It is well within my soul. Oksalayo Floyd is useless!!!”
Just as you are trying to make sense of it all, her dad enters the fray in his capacity as Jacob Zuma, president of MKP. She should apologise, he writes in a letter, or face expulsion from the party.
Eventually, she does. End of story. Or is it? Considering a curious post by MKP member and former public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane, maybe it is not: “Interesting times, the tenant wants the landlord to be removed from their own house.”
Entertaining stuff, the kind that you gather and laugh about with colleagues around the water cooler at work.
That is, of course, if you are not still laughing at your overconfident Orlando Pirates colleagues who left the office on Friday vowing to conquer Loftus Stadium only to return flummoxed on Monday after that 4-1 thrashing by a rampaging Mamelodi Sundowns. (Yes, as they say on social media: Asikakhohlwa!)
Back to politics, it can really come across as a fun sport. Take the bizarre story of MKP parliamentary leader John Hlophe apparently being given a “poorly crafted” speech to read during a parliamentary debate. He was allegedly told to abandon his original speech at the 11th hour to read one that, he was told, had been approved by Zuma.
According to SABC News, Hlophe’s detractors did this in a bid to sabotage him as they don’t want him as caucus leader. The party’s most popular slogan is, after all, Gwaza. So, backstabbing within its ranks shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
Lest you think all this fun and games is confined to Zuma’s relatively new political venture, parliament this week continued to provide entertainment on its own during what was supposed to be a serious debate on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address (Sona).
There seems to be a lot of bad blood between public works minister Dean Macpherson and his deputy, Sihle Zikalala. For context, Zikalala held the portfolio before the ANC lost last year’s general election and had to team up with the DA and other parties to be able to get Ramaphosa re-elected in parliament and for a new government to be formed.
But who would have thought that it would be the EFF that would stand up to protest in parliament on behalf of Zikalala? An EFF MP used the debate this week to condemn Ramaphosa for making Macpherson – who according to the EFF MP, did not go much further with his education after high school – minister ahead of Zikalala, who holds a master's degree.
But in all the entertainment that our politics provides by buckets, we should never forget what the poet and the first president of an independent Angola, Agostinho Neto, said about the purpose of politics – especially in societies that are emerging from decades of foreign domination and racial discrimination. “The important thing is to solve the problems of the people,” he said.
This should always be at the centre of our engagement with politicians and political developments: Is what they are doing and saying helping to solve people’s problems?
In his Sona last Thursday, Ramaphosa correctly pointed to the national water crisis as a key priority for the government this year.
He spoke of a number of initiatives and interventions aimed at resolving the crisis and expressed the government’s commitment to working with the private sector and civil society in dealing with water shortages.
A similar approach, he said, had worked when Eskom was in dire straits and load shedding was at its most destructive levels.
Whether the approach will work or not is yet to be seen. But what is clear is that the water crisis is threatening to undo much of the progress that has been made in the provision of basic services to communities since the attainment of freedom in 1994.
Those that the post-apartheid state has prioritised in terms of water provision because their communities were excluded in the past now find themselves the greatest victims of water shortages. This is largely because of dysfunctional and broke municipalities who have had to divert resources for water and electricity to meet other responsibilities, including the payment of salaries for their staff.
Not for the first time, the national government is promising new measures to fix municipalities and guarantee the provision of safe and reliable water to all. These are the types of issues we should be preoccupied with in order to keep the president and his team accountable and on their toes.
The entertainment aspect of our body politics should not distract us from what should be foremost on our minds: Solving the problems of the people.
S'THEMBISO MSOMI | If politics wasn't such a dirty game, it would really be the nation’s most exciting sport
Image: Thapelo Morebudi
Politics can be highly entertaining. This is especially true in a country like ours where weird political developments happen almost daily.
One night you go to bed with Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla egowisha – in social media isiXhosa – throwing an F-bomb at Floyd Shivambu before calling the MK Party secretary-general a mafikizolo who is “the worst thing that happened” to the party.
The next you wake up to read that she has written: “They will expel me tomorrow… It is well within my soul. Oksalayo Floyd is useless!!!”
Just as you are trying to make sense of it all, her dad enters the fray in his capacity as Jacob Zuma, president of MKP. She should apologise, he writes in a letter, or face expulsion from the party.
Eventually, she does. End of story. Or is it? Considering a curious post by MKP member and former public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane, maybe it is not: “Interesting times, the tenant wants the landlord to be removed from their own house.”
Entertaining stuff, the kind that you gather and laugh about with colleagues around the water cooler at work.
That is, of course, if you are not still laughing at your overconfident Orlando Pirates colleagues who left the office on Friday vowing to conquer Loftus Stadium only to return flummoxed on Monday after that 4-1 thrashing by a rampaging Mamelodi Sundowns. (Yes, as they say on social media: Asikakhohlwa!)
Back to politics, it can really come across as a fun sport. Take the bizarre story of MKP parliamentary leader John Hlophe apparently being given a “poorly crafted” speech to read during a parliamentary debate. He was allegedly told to abandon his original speech at the 11th hour to read one that, he was told, had been approved by Zuma.
According to SABC News, Hlophe’s detractors did this in a bid to sabotage him as they don’t want him as caucus leader. The party’s most popular slogan is, after all, Gwaza. So, backstabbing within its ranks shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
Lest you think all this fun and games is confined to Zuma’s relatively new political venture, parliament this week continued to provide entertainment on its own during what was supposed to be a serious debate on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address (Sona).
There seems to be a lot of bad blood between public works minister Dean Macpherson and his deputy, Sihle Zikalala. For context, Zikalala held the portfolio before the ANC lost last year’s general election and had to team up with the DA and other parties to be able to get Ramaphosa re-elected in parliament and for a new government to be formed.
But who would have thought that it would be the EFF that would stand up to protest in parliament on behalf of Zikalala? An EFF MP used the debate this week to condemn Ramaphosa for making Macpherson – who according to the EFF MP, did not go much further with his education after high school – minister ahead of Zikalala, who holds a master's degree.
But in all the entertainment that our politics provides by buckets, we should never forget what the poet and the first president of an independent Angola, Agostinho Neto, said about the purpose of politics – especially in societies that are emerging from decades of foreign domination and racial discrimination. “The important thing is to solve the problems of the people,” he said.
This should always be at the centre of our engagement with politicians and political developments: Is what they are doing and saying helping to solve people’s problems?
In his Sona last Thursday, Ramaphosa correctly pointed to the national water crisis as a key priority for the government this year.
He spoke of a number of initiatives and interventions aimed at resolving the crisis and expressed the government’s commitment to working with the private sector and civil society in dealing with water shortages.
A similar approach, he said, had worked when Eskom was in dire straits and load shedding was at its most destructive levels.
Whether the approach will work or not is yet to be seen. But what is clear is that the water crisis is threatening to undo much of the progress that has been made in the provision of basic services to communities since the attainment of freedom in 1994.
Those that the post-apartheid state has prioritised in terms of water provision because their communities were excluded in the past now find themselves the greatest victims of water shortages. This is largely because of dysfunctional and broke municipalities who have had to divert resources for water and electricity to meet other responsibilities, including the payment of salaries for their staff.
Not for the first time, the national government is promising new measures to fix municipalities and guarantee the provision of safe and reliable water to all. These are the types of issues we should be preoccupied with in order to keep the president and his team accountable and on their toes.
The entertainment aspect of our body politics should not distract us from what should be foremost on our minds: Solving the problems of the people.
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