The day for buying teevees has begun. #BlackFriday: every marketer’s dream, every marketer’s nightmare. It’s the last day of November and this is the penultimate #ScratchTheSurface for 2024. You made it South Africa, welcome to the end of the year!
Yesterday #RamaPauser gave a speech that would help any insomniac. He used flowery words and his tone resembled a voice you’d hear in a hypnotherapy session. Don’t ask me what he said, even though I watched it. You know that feeling when your eyes glaze over because someone is boring the life out of you? That was me in front of the telly. #NCOP bored me. I had to get the highlights from my media colleagues and I was right, it was as boring as watching a banana rot under duct tape. #VrotBanana.
To be honest, I’ve been glazing over a lot lately. I watched #Mashatile’s #16Days of Activism speech. He banged on about how we couldn’t go on like this and something had to be done to save our women. They’re going to drown you in word vomit for the next sixteen days, all the way up to the notorious holiday season that births chaos. #Dezemba. No one in the world #Dezembas as hard as South Africans. The death toll on the roads is eye-watering, already the nation’s money has dried up and desperation stands in front of the mirror trying to navigate the festive season. We read the #CrimeStats and although murders are down, the numbers still read like a set of war statistics. There is one person who seems to be shining through the dark veil of crime and that is #Mchunu, our minister of Police. I quite like him, don’t you? Look it doesn’t take much to feel good about our police, especially after #BhekiTheHat, but it’s a win and I’ll take it. Better than an entire bunch of bananas.
And then #David Mahlobo, the minister of water and sanitation, told us that there was certainly not a #DayZero and water wasn’t a massive crisis. On the very same day we watched people in #Westbury protest because they’ve had intermittent water for three years and as of last week they have had no water, zip, zero, nada, niente, zilch, nothing. Why isn’t this our most pressing priority, our biggest story, or headlines across every media house; why are we not drowned in social media hashtags? Instead we are mute. We are a strange set of cats aren’t we? #BananaRepublic
Perhaps we’re more concerned with that other less life-threatening human right, that less than thought-provoking evil : #Eskom. This ogre has made the media squirm all week. Do we have another one who seems to know what he’s doing? #Ramokgopa’s drive to move the country to #PrePaidMeters has been full of potholes but the numbers that have come out of this exercise are astonishing. Four hundred thousand new clients have appeared out of thin air and at least one million electricity users have still not come forward. That’s a ton of cash. That must be good? But he plans putting up the lecky bill by 40% over three years? I know, outrageous, but here’s the confusing bit: we’ve had power since the elections (for the most part) and even though my #LoadREDUCTION schedule pings every now and again, nothing happens. And I became a bit blasé about this until we went for a full twenty-four hours without electricity in our small town. This was due to a massive fault. This brought back the horror of days gone by. Where do I deposit that extra 40% again? Is that extortion? #BananaRepublic
#ZamaZamas. As the miners spilled out of the hole so did the awful stories that accompanied them. Over one hundred children surfaced from the crust of the earth as #Stilfontein unveiled teenage slave labour. It doesn’t happen here, “slave labour”, well we didn’t know it did. They come from Namibia, Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Children, illegally in our country, far from home, no parents, no schooling, just living underground digging at the earth amongst a bunch of hardcore gangsters. There is now a call for artisanal mining to be legalised. “Artisanal mining” where did this term come from. You’re calling the most dangerous work amongst the most dangerous men an “artisanal trade”. Although I think that’s putting lipstick on a pig, I do think the problem is so enormous that it has to be regulated. This has been going on for years, longer than I dare to think, how much gold is there? Formalise it and manage it and stop this place going bananas. #DisusedMines and #BananaPeels
#SpazaShops, last week’s big story, is certainly a rotten banana isn’t it? How have we let this go on for so long? At #NCOP, the president told us that over a hundred thousand spazas had been inspected. That’s in just over a week. Do you believe him? I certainly don’t. #BananaNose. He said over one thousand shops were shut down and only a handful of Spazas have re-registered. I read a terrible theory that there is a turf war within this industry between Ethiopians and Somalians. Children are the collateral damage. It’s a scary rumour, and it does make sense. In fact, it’s the first time any of this has made sense. It’s always our kids isn’t it. Suffer little children.
There was breaking news that #ShauwnMkhize has been nabbed by SARS. Pastor #Mboro was back in court and #LongweTwala was re-arrested, not for the #SenzoTrial mind, for stealing a truckload of stuff from his pa Chicco. #Liebenberg’s trial was postponed and talking about nanas we saw a lot of Julius this week; he’s making my eyes glaze nowadays. So sad, isn’t it? I used to hang on every word, now he’s just an unhappy, bitter old man screaming into a vacuum. He said he wants to attach Zuma’s #Nkandla because of all the legal fee debt Zuma placed on the EFF. He said that #MKParty was enemy number one. I kid you not. He said rumours of EFF and MK merging were outrageous and spurious. He said this stuff about #Ndlozi not being allowed to enter the conference is absolute codswallop and then he laid into cupcake. He said Cyril and his Ramatress were as guilty as sin. He said that Cyril and his dollar filled couch must be held to account. We saw the courts open an investigation about what we already know is true and judgement has been reserved in what is surely this week’s biggest story: #PhalaphalaConcourt. I thought this story left the room a little prematurely. It’s ok folks, you know the drill, two years of advocates’ fees and then a bunch of Stalingrad tactics and then just don’t turn up. And when all else fails, appeal. Cyril’s got this. Zuma is a real pioneer in this field, he taught the ANC well.
And then the vrottest banana: The Zionists at BizNews have taken pop shots at the nation’s most precious asset: Gift of the Givers. They reckon Dr Sooliman is sponsored by Iran. I can hear you say “oh come on” from here. What these nasty people don’t realise is that the more they do things like this, the more they expose themselves. #HandsOffGiftOfTheGivers.
To wrap up SA, there are daily weather warnings, especially here in KZN, but no one warned #Randfontein as (what appeared to be) a tornado ripped across the small town. The #Boks hammered home with a 45-12 win against Wales and the nation’s #Matrics have finished writing and the marking begins.
Across the continent, #NamibiaElections took place yesterday and the votes are being tallied as SWAPO tries to hold on to its decades of rule. Putin was firing blank nuke tests, this on the back of statistics that spoke of sixty to a hundred thousand soldiers dead in a war that is not televised. One of the biggest stories internationally is that a #ceasefire was finally agreed to between Hezbollah and Israel. Nothing was said about Gaza and up until the last minutes of the ceasefire deal, Israel was bombing Lebanon as if they were offloading the last of their weaponry in a #BlackFridaySale. After the #ICC issued #ArrestWarrants for #Netanyahu and #Gallant the world finally agreed that Bibi wasn’t first on the Xmas invitation list. Even #Macron was on side until the ceasefire was negotiated and then he said: “nah, only joking, of course old Benji is welcome in gay Paris”. I say the world agreed, I meant to exclude the USA as they gave another $600 million worth of weapons to Israel to blow up Palestinian children.
What else? There was a liveaboard that capsized in the #RedSea. #Australia is banning social media for under sixteens. ‘Merica has been mental. Kamala addressed the nation and I swear she was drunk, I’m not joking, watch our video and decide for yourself if she had a couple of banana daquiris too many. Trump was involved in a bomb scare, nothing happened though. Mexico was in Trump’s crosshairs as he upped the tariffs for cross border transactions. And then the world witnessed a banana being duct taped to a wall and auctioned at six million dollars. It’s art we are told. There is an endless supply of bananas at the gallery, and they have strict instructions on how to replace the banana should it be too ripe. As luck would have it, a fruit stall, manned by the owner who is still trying to figure out how 35 cents became six million, is next to the museum.
There you go good people; you’re all caught up. If the weather permits, I might have a banana milkshake on the dunes overlooking the ocean. I’m Tonya Khoury and thank you for scratching the surface with me and Acumen Media.
