Johannesburg - Last Sunday, Rassie Erasmus was in a bind. Apparently, someone hacked his Twitter account and retweeted a porn clip.
By Monday, his employers, the South African Rugby Union, announced its director of rugby no longer had control of his Twitter account, to World Rugby’s probable relief, but made the rest of us wonder whether this would not become the third instalment in the Erasmus docu-trilogy.
We’ve had Chasing the Sun, where the Boks won the World Cup, then, just recently, Two Sides, where he got banned for that video. Would there now be a Happy Endings in time for Christmas?
Two Sides takes place with the Boks trying to beat Covid and the pride of the British Isles, as the rest of us were praying the entire country wouldn’t go up in flames as Durban burnt last July. That had a Twitter element too, with the Zuma twins tweeting up support for the petrol bombers and Model C-splaining the looters.
It would be interesting if they tried the new dog-ate-my-homework defence: ‘my account was hacked’, when they eventually get prosecuted. But for the defence to work, you’ve got to mean it and act the moment your timeline goes awry with problematic content. The July plotters were unequivocal; they wanted it all to burn to the ground. We see you, Duduzile Defarge.
Rassie, on the other hand, was comical in his desperate attempts to expunge his timeline. Maybe he’s naïve. We’re used to naivete, thanks to Cyril Ramaphosa.
Our president is perennially shocked at the state of the country he ostensibly runs. We don’t know if he was shocked when his domestic worker organised a break in at his farm in February this year to lift $4 million (about R60m) stashed in the cushions of the couches and under the bed.
We don’t even know if he was shocked that Arthur Frazer, whom he axed as head of intelligence, was the one who shafted him by opening a case at the police station – apparently McBuffalo didn’t think he had to report his own break-in.
We don’t even know if CR was shocked that Frazer’s parting gift as prisons boss was to make legal history to medically parole Jacob Zuma on a contempt of court jail sentence.
But we’re shocked. We’re shocked that a billionaire who has run his own multinational businesses and now even a country, managed to break a whole raft of currency and tax laws.
We’re shocked he didn’t get one of his Thuma Minions to stand in the queue and bank the dollars like Sars would have wanted. We’re even more shocked that he couldn’t get an EFT during this Fourth Industrial Revolution.
But most of all, we’re shocked at the quality of his advisers who couldn’t get him to hold a family meeting, but instead let him tell a handful of provincial party apparatchiks that he didn’t steal taxpayers' money.
Maybe he needs to call up Rassie to learn how to front up and apologise, without letting us all feel like we’re bit players in a presidential porno?