KING DOWN

The sad news that Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini has died, comes just a few days after some other royals were pleading for privacy while willingly appearing on a televised interview with a record audience. It’s a hard job being consistently non-royal. The South African government department that does thing will doubtless have opened the handbook to the pages that set the standards for most important and expensive state funerals. This is going to make the “Matric Rage” super-spreader event look like a genteel sneeze into a silk hanky. Guaranteed the police won’t be out arresting people without masks. It’s going to be a long and lavish week and the best we bunny hugger bystanders can hope for is that no leopards will be killed. Zulu royalty are big on leopard skins. English royalty are hard on ermines. The death of Zwelithini must surely in due course reopen the Zululand ownership debate. Apparently, the bulk of the land is held in the name of a trust of which the late king was the sole Trustee. Just how this fits with the alleged shortage of land and the imminent “Expropriation without Compensation” legislation is not easy to say. Chancers of every stripe are soon going to fill the landscape. All Queen Elizabeth has to do is wait for it to settle down and then call the new man to ask if he’d like a chunk of England called Sussex complete with a Duke and Duchess. President Biden hasn’t yet granted an unscripted no holds barred Press Conference but he has donned a Santa Claus suit and dished out trillions of government money to folk who say that Covid-19 hurt them a lot. Worldwide, investors saw this injection of fresh money as good for markets and prices rose. Try that trick in SA and more luxury car makers open dealerships in Joburg. Earlier this week, Stats SA bravely published the GDP number for the last quarter of 2020. It was just over R3 trillion. Obviously, things have improved since the middle of last year when the nation was suffering the earliest economic hammer blows of the Government’s drastic measures to control Covid-19 and the equivalent figure was just R2.6 trillion. This improvement has naturally been much praised by talking heads looking for some good news. What has been less discussed is that a R3 trillion GDP was first reported in 2014 which means that more than half a dozen years of wealth creation has been wiped from the national score card by the lockdown and its consequences. Recall that the figures have been corrected for inflation so that gambit is not available. Some world class leadership and understanding of how wealth is created (Hint: not stealing public funds would be a good start) is desperately needed. Some of the pharmaceutical companies that have developed Covid vaccines and hold patents for them are complaining (who to?) that a hobo is constantly round the back, going through their trash. When challenged it turns out to be a beggar named Cyril with a long and sad story about how he can’t afford vaccine for his citizens and please will they give him the formula so the sangomas back home can brew a batch and he can use it to save lives. The affordability of these potions is undoubtedly an issue, but it ought to be very difficult and embarrassing to whine about it when he represents a government that has used the pandemic in ever more ingenious ways to steal huge amounts of public money. Reportedly SA is vaccinating around only 10 000 patients a day, so it’s going to take a while before our herd can even begin to start mooing about immunity. Meantime some nations are reportedly issuing so-called Immunisation Passports which theoretically confer upon their holders travel freedoms not dreamed of in the past year. It sounds wonderful. Surely the backyard printers are already churning out the counterfeits. It is so much fun reading that the other sides in the 6 Nations are scared of Scotland James Greener Friday 12th March 2021