Probably the most overused phrase in the limited ANC lexicon apart from ‘provincial (or similar) structures’ or ‘loyal cadres’, is the phrase, ‘turnaround strategy’.  I was reminded of this by a newspaper report of 2 March on the Limpopo State of the Province Address (SOPA) debate that ended as a shouting match when the corrupt ANC and the immature EFF were literally at each other’s throats.  The Roads Agency Limpopo (RAL) had revealed to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) that documents relating to R1.1 billion in irregular expenditure had disappeared from the agency’s offices in Polokwane.  A dog ate my homework moment.  So what’s new: the massive irregular expenditure, the loss of documents or the excuse?

The RAL was ordered to sort their document mess out and present a ‘turnaround strategy’!

Now we have the Post Office which has admitted to having a R8 billion hole in their finances.  The old Post Office never shot the lights out.  It wasn’t like the Royal Post Office where a letter posted in the morning would arrive with the afternoon postal delivery.  Nevertheless, ours was reliable, cheap and secure.  Only the most urgent documents were delivered by courier.  Although the long downward process started early on, this really got kickstarted by the complete shutdown by strike action of the Jet Park warehouse hub for months in 2014.  In mid-March the Post Office presented to Parliament its latest turnaround strategy in a hopeful document entitled, Post Office of Tomorrow.  Humph!

The public are sick of these interminable turnaround strategies which begin with the appointment of a new Board, a completely new suite of executives with their completely new office suites, who in turn appoint, without the mandated recruitment processes, a coterie of fools, family members, bae’s and ben10’s, people they owe favours to and some just for luck to make up numbers.  Few are qualified to do the job or are indeed interested.  They make a lot of promises and initiate some grand unthought-through and overpriced projects while they skim and take backhanders in Louis Vuitton handbags.  When it soon turns to guano, the turnstile strategy kicks in.  It’s out with the old and in with the new while the newly jobless are buffed up, retreaded and redeployed elsewhere in the state machinery to continue their work of destruction and corruption. 

Rinse and repeat.

*  This refers to Clever Panda which does not seem to be a copyrighted image or idea but seems to have risen organically and its paw prints are all over the web to become like a meme.

In a 23 February column in Politicsweb, Andrew Donaldson suggested that to save the Rhino from the depredations caused by the Chinese quack remedy industry, we should just reclassify them as Pandas – an eminently innovative approach.  At least the Rhino is hornier than the Panda so breeding back their numbers should be a doddle.   Andrew’s sentiment prompted today’s whimsical cartoon.

Unfortunately, the facts on the ground are not whimsy.  In the decade, 2011 to 2020, about 6800 Rhino were slaughtered at a rate of just under 2 per day.

One of the reasons for the dramatic rise of zooicidal killings, from insignificant numbers prior to 2007, was the advent to the throne by the ANC’s very own Rhino, the horny, thick-skinned and throwback Zuma who was allowed to preside over the country without adult supervision.  Replacing the successful Scorpions with the ineffectual Hawks, the general hollowing out of the Police, together with the very important division of Crime Intelligence and repurposing of the State Security for his own ends, gave carte blanche to parasitic poachers.

In general, the blame should also be laid at the door of the ANC and their brother liberation movements in neighbouring countries whom they refuse to criticise.  The steadily worsening economic conditions in the region and South Africa in particular and the concomitant increasing unemployment has led people to take desperate measures – poaching is one of those.

Many approaches have been tried – like dehorning – but with limited success.  Perhaps Andrew Donaldson is right and we have to think out the box – Priscilla has.

The Phantom of the Opera was a novel written by Gaston Leroux in 1910 and made into a hit musical by Andrew Lloyd Weber in 1986.  It concerns the behind-the-scenes machinations and manipulations of a badly scarred and elusive man in the bowels of the Paris Opera House.  I thought it is a reasonable metaphor of the delusional Mr Putin who wishes to direct and control the world according to his perverse and scarred world view from the labyrinth of his subterranean mind.

Putin directed and starred in his own stage production of lies and bombast on the 18^th of March in the packed World Cup stadium in Moscow and his crowd was definitely bigger than Trump’s even if many had to be coerced or bussed in.  I’m not sure his lies were bigger though and the jury is still out on the question of whose ego is bigger.  Where Putin beats Trump hands down, though, is in his Machiavellian nature.  As Churchill once said about a fellow politician, “He took off his face to reveal his mask.”

Things didn’t end well for the Phantom and hopefully so too for his re-incarnation.

By now, most of the world must have seen the bizarre images of Vladimir seriously social distancing from everyone else, and that’s Putin it mildly.  Even that Young Un with the bad haircut is not as wacky as this.  It first came to my attention when the diminutive fighting cock and Napoleon wannabe from France, Micron, flew to Russia for talks with the pathological Putin just prior to his misguided invasion of Ukraine.  The ostensible reason for the extreme separation was that the Micron had refused to take a Russian PCR test.  I would have too.  He didn’t trust the Russians not to put a little Novichok on the swab or to use his DNA to develop a Micron specific drug that would turn his guts into Macaroni with lots of tomato sauce leaking out.  But it seems that Micron wasn’t the only person to be treated this way.  We have since seen him interacting with his Generals across even greater distances.  This almost comical behaviour along with his bloating in the last five years has led Western commentators to divine various things about him.

1.  This is a wiener waggling contest of my table is bigger than yours.  Given this 5’ 6” cardboard cut-out hero’s penchant for heroic poses, his ego problem is a very real one and he seems to have satisfied it by bullying his smaller neighbours – Chechnya, Georgia and now Ukraine.  (This is one of my theories and not punted by more reputable commentators.)

2.  He is suffering from paranoid dementia.  His irrational behaviour and incoherent justifications could indicate dementia.  As for the paranoid aspect, every Russian leader since the Revolution has lived in fear for their lives.  After a falling out, Trotsky escaped to Mexico where he survived two assassination attempts before finally succumbing to an assassin who attempted to perform a full-frontal lobotomy with an ice-pick in 1940.  Using an ice pick as a weapon in Mexico is typical of the NKVD’s and, later, the KGB’s lack of subtlety.  At home, Stalin solved his problem by routinely shooting members of his inner circle, all except for the butcher, Beria, his head of the security police.  Beria didn’t survive Nikita Khrushchev though when he was judicially executed in 1953.  The rest of the leaders seemed to have survived more or less intact, but as Shakespeare put it, ‘uneasy is the head that wears a crown’.  However, dissidents, defectors and, more lately, opposition leaders have continued to feel the Russian predilection for using poisons to settle a different point of view.  Novichok is the current poison of choice but dioxin is a perennial favourite.

3.  Some have floated the idea that Putin is suffering from a ‘roid rage problem.  His current bloating does suggest that he has abused steroids to make himself seem more manly without spending hours in the gym.

4.  Still others suggest that he might be under treatment for an undisclosed condition which has left his immune system seriously compromised.  His only immunity left, is the immunity to criticism and rationality.

But none of these are a reason for hope.  Take the case of Mugabe.  Irrespective of the rumours of his imminent demise that ran the gamut of medical textbooks, he was like an Energizer bunny for the next 30 years except for the odd catnap during meetings.  Until the very end he continued to stick it to Grace and his people.

Take your pick of the above, but I have a more prosaic answer – being short and suffering from the full range of associated complexes, Putin fears and despises long Covid and his poison scientists probably determined that 20ft (6m) is a minimum safe distance.

(*P.O.E.S. – Person Of Extreme Stupidity)

This pre-empts Time’s Person of the Year by 10 months.  If Time is still around to award it then, I predict that Putin will be the winner, hands down.  It’s going to take an awful lot to displace him.  TS Eliot’s 1925 poem, The Hollow Men, ended with the lines:  This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.

Wrong, but then again, they hadn’t discovered the neutron yet, let alone the nuclear bomb, and it was to be 27 years before the unfortunate Mrs Putin would carry the spawn of the devil to term.  This single Horseman of the Apocalypse made the Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2007 when he completed his first term of office.  Time was rather presentient as they stated in the accompanying article, “If Russia fails, all bets are off for the 21st century.”  Perhaps they should have said, “If Putin fails, …”  After the drunken and chaotic Yeltsin years, Russia hankered for stability, order and the respect of being a superpower, even if it was oppressive dictatorships that provided it.  Cometh the hour, cometh the maniac – Putin.  Using all the techniques from the Communist playbook, he has taken complete control of the country until 2036 and has stopped all forms of opposition by assassinations and secret trials on trumped up charges – ask Novalny.

Using extensive false flag techniques, outright lying that the West was the aggressor and peddling false historical facts concerning the Ukraine, Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine in his and his coterie’s warped minds.  Unfortunately for his troops this wasn’t Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 when a column of tanks could reinstall a puppet regime.  The Ukrainians have fought back.  As his triumphant invasion has stalled, the rhetoric has increasingly become unhinged to the point that he is effectively threatening nuclear Armageddon in the West. 

The West: I raise you 5 sanctions.  Putin: I raise you 2000 nuclear warheads.

How do you begin to negotiate with a P.O.E.S.?