Day after day you wake up in this country to the same old headlines of corruption, incompetence and laziness. Initially SMAC fought back with satirical opinion pieces illustrated with ridiculing cartoons. After lambasting the same-old, same-old SONA speech year after year, sonorously read off by that master of platitudes, Cyril, SMAC realized it was time to move on before his head turned to putu pap. He even cancelled his Daily Maverick contribution to preserve his positive outlook on life. After a diversion into the delusional world of Putin came the master of all delusion, Trump, who grabbed the world by its collective pussy and got SMAC’s full attention. Every single day Trump does something so stupid, so cringeworthy, so narcissistic that an intelligent person’s brain eventually ends up like the ball in a pinball machine played by an expert player if followed for too long. The only survival strategy was to go cold turkey which has worked for a few weeks.
So, although this Quick SMAC is not about him (who must be obeyed in the current US Administration of bootlickers), SMAC timorously invokes his name as a segue into a similar businessman in South Africa. If Trump has delusions of grandeur and has conned people out of a lot of money and their votes with his overhyped self-promotion, promises, exaggerations and lies, he has a mirror locally in the slimy Iqbal Surve. He is in fact Trump lite, about 50kgs lighter, and doesn’t want to rule the world, but just SA.
A few years ago he wanted to become a media mogul and do his black transformation bit so he decided to buy the Independent News & Media (think Cape Times, Argus etc.) and to trash it with his vision of ‘journalism’, fake stories and self-promotion. One problem though, he was short of funds so he approached the PIC (Public Investment Corporation which is supposed to prudently invest government pension funds). In South Africa there was a popular radio game show that ran from 1955 to 1975 called, Pick a Box, with the catch phrase, “Money or the box!” All Iqbal had to do was to PIC the doos*. This was Dan Matjila, head of PIC, and the doos spewed out billions from his cash register. That went tits up when Iqbal stopped paying the interest on the debt. It got worse when he squeezed even more money out of the doos with a pie-in-the-sky media play that was going to be worth tens of billions. Sounds just like Trump, doesn’t he. This move was too puke inducing for SMAC to pursue at the time when SMAC was quitting commenting on SA. However, since SMAC takes an interest in aeronautical matters, his eye was attracted to a recent article about a helicopter crash published by Independent on Line, a part of Iqbal’s empire of 3rd rate news reporting.
The headline screamed helicopter crash in Zim, the caption of the attached photo repeated the claim and so did the reporting in the article. In their incompetence they used a photo of a private jet crash. To compound this, it looks like the jet was AI generated as the engine assembly is odd, the fuselage seems to be unpainted and there are no plane numbers visible. Perhaps they were a bit cheap and didn’t want to pay for even a stock photo but at least they could have got the helicopter bit right.
*doos is Afrikaans for box and also used as an insult as in, “You’re a c&%t!”