The Mummy Returns: That movie should not have been about Arnold Vosloo in pharaoh-drag; it should have been about Winnie Madikizela-Mandela!

Her bruise from Thabo's swipe has now at last hit the European press. In some areas of the continent she is still regarded in ghettos and laundrettes as Nelson Mandela's heir apparent, a part she plays to the hilt.

And yet the general reaction over here to the Youth Day klap has been more sympathetic to our president than to the Mugger of the Nation, who some feel got what was coming. Most see Thabo Mbeki as a lonely man leading an insane country and trying to succeed against huge odds, while constantly up against the grandstanding of the former wife of the former president, who thinks she is the Queen Mummy!

Let's for a moment forget whom Winnie M&M thinks she is and look at her for what she's costing the country! We pay her salary as MP and president of the Women's League. We pay her car allowances, airfares and upgrades to first class, hotel extras, hospital bills, hair braid bills and any other Bill who is on her payroll. And yet she is never at her post as MP. The virtual Comrade M&M!

She is always late, not due to African time, but because she likes playing the dowager empress to Thabo's young pretender. She enjoys upstaging him, simply because no one has ever had to courage to say: "Auntie! Get off the stage en sit op jou gat! You're not even in this play!"

She encourages the urban legend that she alone in the ANC can deliver 5 million votes at the ballot box and enthuses fringe lunatics like me to suggest, my tongue firmly in her cheek, that she might even be our next president! Well, she's not yet and frankly one thinks her nine lives are all used up by now. This mummy has returned so often, maybe its time to send her off to a deep and faraway pyramid!

President Thabo? For the sake of your sanity and the future of our diplomatic service, if not the country as a whole, appoint Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as South African ambassador to North Korea! And hurry - before the sun sets and the lid slides off!