It’s hard to believe but President Frogboiler reportedly opened some more toilets this week. What happens when all these international big cheeses gather in some gilded hall of mirrors and say adult stuff to each other? Does it go like this? “What did you do this week Joe?” “Blow up some pipelines?” “Good stuff, and you Liz?” “I told Charles that he can’t go and show off his new job at the climate congregation.” “Well! That was brave.” “Whoops here comes that Cyril the cow fancier. Scatter everyone. I hear he opened some more toilets and he'll drone on about it for hours.”
Tourism Minister Lindiwe Sisulu described of the murder of a German tourist in the area of Kruger Park area as a “glitch” in the statistics. This is off the scale insensitive in every way. This nation suffers on average 500 “glitches” a week and every one of those is a tragedy. Sisulu and her fellow cabinet members are entirely responsible for not doing anything about it. The concurrent news that 10 000 police officers have criminal records and that three times that number of police firearms are lost each year should have the whole disgraceful bunch of complacent clueless politicians out in the desert building their own prisons.
Its puzzling that so many elections -- think US presidential, UK Tory party leadership and now our own ANC leadership -- take so long, are often challenged and have a wholly unexpected outcome. It turns out that it is difficult to design a voting system that is perfectly fair to all candidates and voters. Firstly, it seems that the party system often gets in the way and it’s difficult to separate whether a voter is selecting a representative or a party. Then there is the ideal that every vote cast should have identical weight in the outcome. You will have noticed in horror the calibre of the pugilists embroiled in the fight to determine the next leader of the ANC and by definition, of the nation. should be. The “step-down” principle boasted about by the ANC as a method for mothballing any particularly careless and care-free miscreants, seems to have been forgotten. But it doesn’t matter much, they are all of them very unappealing leaders. [1]
Professional sports men and women are undoubtedly delighted with the dramatic bursting on to the scene of Arab money determined to enlist the best athletes that money can buy. The old guard custodians of the traditions and customs are grumbling. The youngsters and “sell-outs” are flipping through the yacht catalogues.
There was a time when the plan to have the Soccer World Cap take place in Qatar was a distant foolishness never likely to be real. But now it is upon us and the pre-tournament sport to watch is the soft-shoe shuffling and the sleight of hand going on to deny that soccer fans as a sub-species of humanity are notoriously thirsty, louche and ill-behaved. Few would strike one as the ideal visitor to an Islamic nation. But hey the world is full of surprises. The canny hosts probably have squadrons of windowless cargo-planes hidden behind the hill ready to deport the noisiest and most unruly with a minimum of fuss.
In the meantime, in another flagrant and flamboyant display of what money can achieve, Saudi Arabia, right next door, has been selected to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games in NEOM megacity. That the host city has yet to be built is not as surprising as the news that the Asian nations have their own Winter Games. How long before we hear the whines of a teenage girl pointing out that manufacturing snow and ice in an environment better suited to hosting epic sand-trap and bunker-play golf competitions, is bad for the planet?
Tidemarks is now going “on trail” to a bit of our country most people rarely reach (the Breede River estuary) and will not be writing a letter next week.
James Greener
Friday 7th October 2022 (apologies for last week’s dating typo)
