What was Baleka Mbete thinking when she decided to host the Speaker’s Ball 2017 at 8pm on SONA night? asks Andrew Donaldson
Never mind the State of the Nation address and the by-now customary parliamentary pandemonium. Here at the Mahogany Ridge our concerns lay with Speaker Baleka Mbete’s after-fracas party. Billed as the Speaker’s Ball 2017, it was intended to “recognise and celebrate” Mbete’s office.
This was a knees-up the ruling party had insisted was a private affair that had nothing to do with Parliament or the ANC.
Mbete had said as much when, earlier in the week, she revealed that her guests on Thursday evening would include “stakeholders, colleagues, friends and comrades”.
These, we supposed, were exactly the sort of people Mbete needed to impress since she had declared her intention to run for presidency of the ANC at its national conference in December.
This hadn’t stopped speculation as to exactly who was footing the bill for the ball. Sadly, many of us felt it should have been held on another night.
Consider. The President started his speech at 7pm. The ball’s invitation was for 8pm with dinner, after cocktails, at 9pm. What was Mbete thinking? Arriving fashionably late is one thing, but there was no way she was going to make her own party – even if, by some miracle, arrangements went according to plan. Which, as we all know, they never do.
For a start, the speech was 5 600 words long. A skilled orator could have sailed through that dull stinker in perhaps 45 minutes. Even with flesh-pressing afterwards and posing for photographs, there would have been time enough for Mbete to be whisked off to the ball and arrive, Cinderella-like, before guests sat down to eat.
Let’s just say Jacob Zuma is not that orator.
Now factor in the EFF. Julius Malema and company were always going to disrupt proceedings. They said as much themselves, and often.
The only surprise was that they prevented Zuma from speaking for a full hour before the Whiteshirts’ eventual violent intervention.
ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe believes they should have been ousted after 20 minutes.
As that hour dragged on, Mbete’s frustration grew more apparent.
Was she worried the canapes would be cold by the time she got to the ball? Would her comrades save her dessert?
Would she make it to the hotel before the witching hour when her carriage turned into a blue-light pumpkin?
More worryingly, at least as far as members of the public gallery and TV viewers were concerned, it became distressingly clear in that eventful hour that our parliamentary discourse had sunk to the dim depths of the worst sort of bar room prattle.
Frankly, the insults were appalling, and ours is indeed an age of dumb if the evening’s most memorable contumely was the EFF’s description of Zuma as a “constitutional delinquent”. We are, of course, a young democracy and it may be a while before we hear disparagements from our lawmakers that are genuinely worth repeating. The sort of thing, for example, that former American presidents say of one another, like Lyndon Johnson of Gerald Ford: “(He’s) a nice guy, but he played too much football without a helmet.” Or Harry S Truman of Richard Nixon: “He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and even if he caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.”
In the interests of a more lively public life, we have developed The Mahogany Ridge Patented Random Old School Insult & Mild Oath Generator.
Choose terms from list A below with terms in list B, et voila, the ideal verbal assault. People may wonder what you’re on about, but there’s no doubting how immensely intelligent you’ll sound.
A: Yellow, knuckle-dragging, small-eared, pongy, homely, snuffish, revisionist, light-footed (offensive), decrepit, regressive, fascist, agrarian, boondoggling, low-born, carpet-bagging, plebbish, Chartist, crony, special needs, hard-of-thinking, federalist, colonial, child-bothering, groupthinking, three-legged, lumpy, nomenklatural, bog-standard, mendacious, bongo-drumming.
B: Worm, couscous-eater, Neanderthal, poodle, night-walker, used fish-monger, bird-dogger, pulpit bully, crony, dark horse, kiddy-fiddler, double-speaker, fifth columnist, soup of the day, jingoist, hollow person, pygmy, junta baby, visigoth, mixed matophor (I’ll bet), oligarchist, suspicious stain, winky puff.
* Andrew Donaldson’s A Famous Grouse column is published every Saturday.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.