HOGARTH | Cyril rocks the clock

Hogarth was pleased to see that, despite the stresses that come with the rigours of running a country with so many problems — plus his own woes like Phala Phala — President Cyril Ramaphosa has not lost his sense of humour or his common touch.

This week, while addressing students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Cupcake got the urge to show off his street cred, telling his audience to “clock it”. Repeating the in vogue Gen Z phrase, the Buffalo had his young audience eating out of the palm of his hand as he “clocked” his fingers several times.

Smart politician that he is, Ramaphosa must have had his eye on the youth vote, what with November 4 fast approaching.

Enough to make your hair curl

ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba was one of the invited speakers at this year’s Black Business Council meeting held in Ekurhuleni.

Although now a politician, the man who made his money selling hair products that promised “permanent curls” for his black clientele is still revered by those who seek to be entrepreneurs in this tough Ramaphosa economy.

And so, when he said that if he were elected to power he’d grow the economy by 5% every year, everybody sat up and listened. But how?

“An easy [solution to one big mistake] that ActionSA will provide is to deal with this issue of illegal and undocumented foreign nationals … We need mass deportation of anyone who is in our country illegally,” Mashaba told his audience.

Hogarth has heard of “voodoo economics”, often espoused by political parties to the left of Julius Malema, but “mabahambe economics”?

An unlikely pair

Speaking of economics, political pundits like to call Jacob Zuma’s current political vehicle, the MKP, a populist party. But if its new first deputy president and Zuma’s favourite son Duduzane’s words are anything to go by, they have been misreading the Nkandla Crooner’s party all along. Speaking at a BizNews seminar recently, Duduzane revealed that he “shares a lot of similarities” with DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis.

“We do have the same understanding when you speak about meritocracy, when you speak about free markets, when you speak about opportunities, industrialising … that’s what we are about.”

Duduzane would later tell Alec Hogg: “I’m not a communist at all. I’m a businessman; that makes me a capitalist one hundred percent.”

Hogarth is not sure about the “businessman” part, but who would have thought that the Nkandla Crooner left Luthuli House only to establish a black DA in green t-shirts?

A revolting loss of memory

The audience seemed to be loving the younger Zuma for what he was saying until he opined that South Africa owes a lot of gratitude to the Nkandla Crooner. “We should thank our lucky stars for that gentleman for one reason and one reason only: he has held back a lot of revolt in this country, pre-1994 and post-1994 …”

Hogarth knows that Duduzane travels abroad a lot, but surely even he has heard of the July 2021 riots.

Fortune-telling — and a fib

Attending the same event was Prince Mashele, a former government functionary who transformed himself into a celebrated political analyst before venturing into the lucrative business of political fortune-telling.

He spoke a day after Duduzane and told the audience: “The moment Zuma [the Nkandla Crooner] drops dead, Zuma the junior thinks he is a big thing. It is not going to happen. It [the MKP] is falling apart while Zuma is alive.”

Mashele foreseeing the Nkandla Crooner’s death reminded Hogarth of a fib about Zuma, who was the country’s president at the time, being briefed by one of his ministers on government plans in the event of Nelson Mandela’s death.

It is said that after the minister had explained what he and his department would do in that event, JZ turned to the minister and said: “You speak as if you know for certain that you will still be alive when that happens.”

Driven to egotism

It has not been a good weekend for the now-removed National Student Financial Aid Scheme administrator, Hlengani Mathebula. First, a court suspended him from his post and reinstated the disbanded NSFAS board. As if that was not enough, it emerged that his staff at the NSFAS once booked him into two separate hotels for the same nights and that he was disappointed when a car rental company told him they did not have the particular car he wanted and he had to settle for a VW Tiguan.

“I don’t like the brand, for that matter, but I drive it because that’s what I have been given,” he said. At taxpayers’ expense, surely this amper mampara should be grateful even if he is given a Kwid.