The Week That Was

Gerald Potash

Hello again,

Zandile Christmas Mafe did something that Guy Fawkes couldn’t do. He brought the Houses of Parliament down. 

Our Parliament went up in smoke on Sunday night and then again on Monday afternoon fire broke out in our parliament buildings. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories about who, why, and how this all happened and there are one or two strange incidents to consider. Who turned off the sprinkler system which comes on automatically when fire starts, why were there no guards guarding the building and why was nobody watching the cameras? These policing services are not cheap and we tax-payers pay for them. 

Ramaphosa, on Monday gave credit to the Cape Town city administration and their fire dept for the way they worked at Parliament, but a question…..how come the fire dept got to parliament before the alarms sounded?

Then, was the cutting of the electricity wires that plunged the Cape Town city centre and the posh Atlantic suburbs into darkness for 19 hours last week deliberately done as part of a plot to embarrass the DA who govern the Western Cape?

Are the two cases connected and has the RET-faction in the ANC got anything to do with it?

What is certain is that a suspect has been arrested—how do you find a suspect so quickly when you have no clue where to look for him— and brought to court but we don’t know yet whether he is an ANC member working for the RET faction which is so closely aligned to Jacob Zuma and Ace Magashule or whether he is a demented loner. How did he carry out all the lap-tops that he took and why was he carrying reams of paper documents? 

His trial has been postponed until next Tuesday when he will be back in court.

Accused No 1’s daughter, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla is again in trouble for ‘inciting violence’. She has more than 170,000 followers on Twitter and tweeted “Cape Town…We See You! Amandla!” and “Give the guy a Bell’s” with reference to the fire in Parliament.

She tweeted a very similar line at the time of the insurrection last July when parts of  KZN were burning and the DA instigated a charge since the NPA did nothing. But again nothing has come of that action since.

At last the Zondo Commission report is out. Well, at least Part 1 of the report was handed to Cyril on Tuesday afternoon, in spite of an urgent court application, refused, that he should not receive it because he is directly implicated in State Capture.

But with the fist section out it is easy to see how Accused No 1 was manipulated by anyone who was willing to pay him. By the time the third and final part is handed over I would imagine Accused No 1 will be directly implicated with enough charges to keep him in jail for several hundred years where I hope he will rot in an orange overall.

To me the key quote from the 874 pages of the report are

“President Zuma fled the Commission because he knew there were questions that would be put to him that he would not have been able to answer.”

More importantly though, the release of this report and the analysis thereof will almost certainly be the death-knell for the ANC. The corruption that so decimated the State is untenable and hopefully plenty of orange overalls will be the inevitable result. But the majority of ANC voters will never get to hear about the report or see it—even if they could read it.

The problem is that Ramaphosa has said that the government would only act after all three parts of the report are handed in from Zondo. Why aren’t you surprised? Cyril is such a wuss.

But Cyril did say that action could be action taken by different entities so let’s hope that Tom Moyane, Malusi Gigaba, Dudu Myeni, Brian Molefe and all the others who we have all got to know so well will now get early wake-up calls from the police this week and get taken to the nearest Magistrates Court to be charged. There are plenty more who could be charged and wouldn’t it be nice to see these arrogant crooks squirm?

We can only hope that those who benefited so deviously from State tenders and the like will now eventually be hounded down, brought to trial and made to pay in the nightmare that is a SA prison for what they have done to this country. Even in this first report there is enough evidence for the authorities to arrest the dishonest Jacob Zuma so that he can spend the rest of his days rotting in jail.

The blatant and callous dishonesty which thrived on Zuma’s watch, crippling the State was undertaken with his direct co-operation and it deserves only one result, jail.

Cyril, now it really is time for action.

Thuli Madonsela, on whose recommendation the Zondo Commission was established said this week that the matter is simple and that the Commission was set up to investigate “Was the State captured to support the businesses co-owned by the President’s son, Duduzane  and the Guptas?

Read the report and make up your own mind. I read a depressing article in The Guardian this week about SA. Thank you, John for sending it on. It talks about lack of service, poor policing, no power, no water, etc and it talks of voluntary neighbourhood watch organisations undertaken in the unlikely suburb of the sprawling township of Khayelitsha near the Capetown airport (with half a million inhabitants). New settlements have sprung up on sand where shacks are close together and the names of some of these settlements are Quarantine, Social Distance and Sanitiser. Here, too people have lost faith in the government and do what they can to protect their loved ones and their property. I took this photo of the shacks in Khayelitsha where the Baden Powell Drive coastal road runs not far from Somerset West. Every day the Township just grows with poor from the Eastern Cape who come to look for work, or from the (illegal) Africans escaping their countries.

It shouldn’t surprise you that the Mampara of the week in the Sunday Times is Jacob Zuma. Not a word did he utter at the passing of Tutu. People from all over the world said nice things and even some not such nice things, but from the ex-President and jailbird not a word. Our Minister of Police, Bheki Cele could easily also have earned a Mampara status. This cartoon from 2lani in the Citizen yesterday says it all.

Some good news is that the price of petrol has come down, that the 2nd cricket test has been much better than first and with the play interestingly poised hopefully we can pull this one off and level the series. That would be great with the final test scheduled for Newlands starting on Tuesday.  Also good news is that we have had no Eskom outages for over  a month.

Socially this week has been a lot different to many others. Covid has kept us apart and it was lovely sitting with Ivan who like me grew up in Stellenbosch and went into business there before he emigrated. He and Rene come back here quite often and just to sit and catch-up with him and air political ideas about Israel and South Africa is just so very stimulating.  Ivan explained how very important the Arab community (just more than 21% of the population) and the Arab Party in particular is in the new Israeli parliamentary set-up, where they are an important part of the ruling coalition government. He told me how well the new Prime Minister, Naftali Bennet  is doing and how large parts of that Arab population are now joining the army and are very much part of Israel. Israel is not an Apartheid State at all in any shape or form; but try to tell that to our government or the bigoted BDS movement.

Then the Usual Suspects got together for a luncheon for the first time in ages. What made this meeting different is that that character of note Dennis, Robin and Henry all brought their wives with them to sit under the beautiful oak trees at Lourensford. What could be better than that on a lovely summers’ day? We chatted local politics, drank some wine, told some jokes had some lunch and suddenly four hours had passed and it was time to go home. We missed Paul and his wife who would have completed the team. The world champion was also absent, unfortunately.

The sudden decision of one of our key cricketers to withdraw from the Proteas cricket side mid-series has come as a shock. Now it seems that there is continuing dissension in the camp and our wicket-keeper and top batsman, Quinton de Kock has said “so far and no more” as far as test cricket is concerned.

CricketSA is a shambles. They owe fortunes and are losing money and the Board members are accused of putting themselves ahead of the players. Not good.

And players like de Kock can make a very handsome living playing in the shorter formats of the game all over the world.

The test match itself went well with the Proteas in a winning position needing just 122 runs with 8 wickets standing.

Spurs won against Watford at Vicarage Rd on the weekend. A single goal late in the game earned Spurs a valuable 3 points on the Premiership log and our team is getting ever closer to the very important, for European competition, top four.

Last night Tottenham were up against Chelsea away in the first leg of the Caraboa Cup semi-final and were outplayed 2-0 by a more energetic side. They still have the home leg to play but I think you will agree that it looks as if Chelsea have one foot in the final.

COYS!

As always,

Gerald