*  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.? 

In mid-1940 with the atavistic German hordes rampaging though Western Europe with little hinderance and staring down the barrels of multiple guns of multiple calibres, the French generals indicated their readiness to cravenly surrender to Hitler.  Churchill demurred and stated that Britain was going fight on.  Having stubbed his cigar in the eye of Gallic pride, the French generals, with their Gallic noses distinctly out of joint, replied that Britain would ‘have her neck wrung like a chicken.’ 

Having seen off the Germans in the Battle of Britain and just about surviving in the Mediterranean, Churchill was on a tour in Canada 18 months later when he related the story and added, “Some chicken! Some neck!”

Fast forward 81 years and we find Ukraine under the cosh of the Putinic forces intent on establishing a buffer state against Western Imperialisim – good old Communist knee-jerk paranoia.  According to some reports, the going has been slower than the Russians planned and Kiev seems be a tough old bird.

Chicken Kiev – Some chicken! Some neck!

In an early act of cultural appropriation, circa 1900, Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, borrowed the West African proverb: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”  Since then, this has become the cornerstone of American diplomacy and countless John Wayne-style westerns.

The West’s response to Putin’s blatant aggressive and posturing, like a dog on heat, has been decidedly tepid.  Their big stick has been more of a hoary old divining rod that twitches every so often, hopefully indicating a way forward. 

Hanging over the European nations, particularly Germany, is that fact that they have supped with the devil in seeking cheap gas supplied via a pipeline direct from Russia.  The result has been a few threatening statements and the flying in of a few extra weapons.  Oh yes, America did send a lightly armed battalion into Poland, more than 1000km away from any frontline.  The main weapon in the West’s response arsenal has been the threat of sanctions.

Sanctions never stopped Hugo Chavez nationalising the filthy rich Venezuela into economic oblivion.

Sanctions never gave a moment’s pause to Mugabe and his thugs as he stole elections through mass killings and intimidation and drove his country into miserable irrelevance, sucking off the desiccated hind tit of SA to survive.

Sanctions never stopped the Ayatollahs of Iran from spewing jihadist bile and continuing their nuclear weapons program.

Sanctions never stopped the young un of the hermit kingdom from growing fat on the backs of his people’s starvation while playing Solitaire Megalomania with his nuclear program and ICBM’s in his private bunker.

Sanctions never diverted the course of destructive socialism during the nigh-on 60 years of the Castro family’s ideological rule.

Closer to home, sanctions never caused the old Nationalist government to waver in the least in their racial beliefs and, in fact, served as a useful propaganda tool at election time.  Their kragdadigheid (forcefulness or hard-arsed attitude) in the face of international opprobrium served to drive all the fence sitters into their camp to deliver the largest majority that the Nationalist Party had ever seen.

Sanctimonious sanctions don’t work.  All they do is to provide those governments with a fig leaf to hide the embarrassment of their shrivelled-up impotence.  They are as irrelevant to the course of history as that flimsy piece of paper that Chamberlain waved when he claimed a “peace for our time” after a meeting with Hitler in 1938.

Mandela promised us a Rainbow Nation colourfully and charismatically led by the Arch in his purple daze.

Mbeki next foresaw an African Renaissance which became a Dream Deferred until further notice when the historical library in Mali that SA helped refurbish was trashed by jihadists.

Zuma actually delivered a New Age, except it was a SOE funded newspaper written by his Gupta gabbas.

Cyril tossed his hat into the ring when he dared to dream of a New Dawn during his inauguration in 2018.

He doubled down on that idea in 2019 with an “I had a dream” moment.  He described inspirational, sangoma-like visons of bullet trains linking smart mega-cities, some of which didn’t exist yet (and never will).

Covid put grand dreams and schemes on hold except for people like Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma who had visions of a smoke and alcohol-free future which she could order by fiat.  For a brief period she wielded more power than all the previous presidents.  The Nationalist Party gave us Dr No (Dr AP Treurnicht) and the ANC gave us Dr Party Pooper with her mirthless, glum visage.  At a stroke of her poison administrative pen, she entrenched low-life criminal gangs in our society with their bootleg smokes and alcohol to the tjoon of 10s of billions of Rands, tax free. 

Covid also engendered visions of SA becoming a vaccination hub as a shot on the arm of the economy.  This pipe dream took root particularly after the developed world stuck it to us, not that we’ve done much with the vaccines now that they’re freely available.

Fast forward to the 2022 SONA. Cyril foretold of an end to the SOD (State of Disaster).  Unfortunately, he wasn’t talking about the resurrection of the country into a winning nation after 27 years of devastation caused by state capture, racist socialist policies and ideologies, incompetent and corrupt SOE Boards and executives, general corruption at every level and in every national, provincial and local department, overstaffing with overpaid, unmotivated and largely underqualified government employees, political and trade union violence and intransigence, political assassinations, pie-in-the-sky theoretical dreams like outcomes-based education, …. 

No, he was talking about something much easier.  At the stroke of an administrative pen, his war council will lift most of the remaining restrictions of our confinement.  Is it going to make much difference?  No, it just means that we can get mugged by people not wearing masks and sanitising beforehand.  Hopefully though, it will mean an end to the hugely overpriced and largely unnecessary deep cleaning of schools and government buildings on the nearest whiff of a Covid case – a small win in the junkyard of shattered dreams.

All I have to say is – SOD them and SOD off.