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Muckraker

Roasting in misery

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Lesotho’s rumour mill was in overdrive this week after someone leaked pictures of Uncle Tom and his sweetheart swallowing sausage and pork.
Uncle Tom looked dapper in a matching short, T-shirt and beret.
His mochesi was also looking neat in a white T-shirt and a black cap.
The first photo showed them roasting meat.

In the second one they were slouched on pool chairs, having obviously loaded their privileged tummies to the brim.
Muckraker could hear the air filling with jealous and envy coming from all corners of the country.

That much was confirmed by the snide comments that accompanied the pictures. Haters created an impression of a couple having a good time while the people starve. Of course, Uncle Tom can afford sausage and pork.
And he wasn’t rubbing it in our faces because he obviously didn’t take that picture and post it on social media.

Here was an old man having a blast with his mochesi and someone snapped them in that moment of bliss.
The vitriol that followed was therefore unwarranted.
What should concern some zealots-cum-loathers is that the couple did not seem worried about the chaos in the country and the ABC.
Clearly the ranting from those who want Uncle Tom out has no effect on the romance. The dogs are barking while the chariot creaks on.
Does that get your goat countrymen?

Well, that is the point. Blame your misery on your unbridled exuberance in June 2017. It was you who was gyrating and screaming your voice hoarse at the ABC rallies. You even prayed for the party to win the election.
You willingly fasted for their victory and now you are being forced to fast for months.

Don’t cry, for this too will come to pass. Find a quiet place to lick your wounds while hoping that something dramatic will happen.
Take heart for this matter is no longer in your hands.
No amount of shrieking on social media, radio and newspapers will change your miserable affairs.

From the way the lovebirds were roasting at the State House, Muckraker is convinced that they have the skill to grill you for a few more months.

Hear, hear, hear!
There is a shameless battalion of MPs sweating and screaming to justify the M500 000 interest-free loans they have been stuffing into their deep pockets for years.
This is despite that the loans have been exposed as nothing but a thieving scheme. That is what they are.

The looting has intensified in recent years as MPs manipulate successive coalition governments to settle their loans.
Their inane argument has always been that they cannot afford to repay their loans after losing their jobs.
The government, which is led by MPs, has repeatedly obliged by paying off the loans. In the past five years the government has paid M75 million for the MPs. The corruption of it all is staggering.

MPs come into parliament and receive M500 000. Parliament collapses after two years when the MPs have repaid less than half of the loans. The government then repays the outstanding portions for them and the MPs are miraculously debt-free.
Once re-elected the same MPs quickly take another M500 000, part of which is repaid by the state when the government collapses midway.
So each collapse of the government is a chance for the MPs to have their loans paid off by the state. An election is an opportunity to get new loans. This cycle of state-sponsored sleaze continues.

What irritates Muckraker is that some MPs are so delusional that they think this robbery is fair.
For years Basotho have been clamouring for an end to this dubious scheme.
In the process some MPs have come back to their senses and can see that this pilfering of state resources is witchcraft.
Size Two is now saying MPs should repay their loans even if the government collapses. That is how it should be.

It’s just that he is speaking out M75 million later. Still, it’s instructive that he has awakened to the deception that benefited him and his comrades.
It’s never too late to repent. There comes a time when the conscience wins the battle against greed and selfishness.
We welcome Size Two from the den of thieves. We just hope he doesn’t backslide. But there are some MPs who will fight to death to keep their hands in the cookie jar.

The same cannot be said about Fako Moshoeshoe, the ABC MP who wants to keep his calloused hands in the cookie jar. He says the loans should continue because our MPs are paid far less than their peers in the region. His reasoning here is skewed for several reasons.
First, Lesotho’s economy is the smallest in the region. Second, not a single salary in this government is benchmarked according to the regional scales. Third, Fako is not working for the region but little Lesotho.
His salary is paid by Lesotho, not the region.

Fourth, Fako has never screamed about other employees being paid less than their peers in the region.
His attempt to evoke the “region” is meant to justify the thievery that has been happening in parliament for years.
Fako and his comrades should work in the “region” if Lesotho is not paying them well.
An MP’s salary is a function of what a country can afford, not what the MP thinks they are worth.

Fako should not pretend to be smart by talking about regional salaries. He was a soldier in Lesotho and earned far less than other soldiers in the region.
As a farmer, he is not as rich as those across the border.
So he must just zip it.

But there is a much more compelling reason why Fako’s “regional” argument should be dismissed as delusional.
MPs are elected, not hired. He wasn’t invited to be an MP.
There was no interview to test his acumen and competence.
Anyone can do his job. There is no special skill required.
Even Sarah, the donkey, can be an MP.

If any MP thinks they are special then they just have to quit their job and see if that job will be vacant for more than a month.
There is no shortage of politicians in this country.
And given the tomfoolery in parliament, it is clear that any one and anything can be an MP. A scarecrow could do just fine as an MP.

We could have a baboon in Fako’s position and debates could go on.
In any case, Muckraker thinks a baboon will do a much better job than most MPs. Baboons are agile and innovative. The same cannot be said for most of our MPs who are indolent dimwits.
We should not be paying for such tosh. Never!

Nka! Ichuuuuuuuuuuu!

muckraker.post@gmail.com

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Muckraker

Maretlane’s dish rubbish

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Muckraker is still recovering from the Moshoeshoe Walk but her fatigue has nothing to do with the 116km she endured. The walk in the mountains – far from the rascals, perverts, thieves and pretenders of Maseru – was fun.

The pain in her muscles was inflicted by the epic incompetence she witnessed over the three-day walk. Someone should tell Thabo Maretlane to either shape up or ship out.

They say it takes at least 10 000 hours to master a skill. Maretlane has been managing the walk for 17 years but has been consistently doing a shoddy job of it. He is dependable like that.

He has one year to organise the three-day event but for some reason, only known to him, he still botches it every time.

This year he bungled spectacularly. It was as if he had spent the past 16 years mastering the art of mismanagement. By the time this year’s walk started, he was ready to deliver some top-notch shit show.

Oh shame! He brought his ‘A’ game to the mountains and stole the show while the world watched. It was a fantastic display of incompetence. 

The kind that leaves you dazed. He pushed the frontiers of mediocrity. 

Even he could not believe he was capable of sinking to such levels. 

Maretlane started dishing it out from day one. Breakfast was a croissant, a small yoghurt and a piece of dry cheese. And that was it. Off you go into the mountains, he said. 

After a few kilometres hikers were stopped for some speeches from dignitaries. 

And so they waited, waited and waited. There is nothing wrong with some delays. 

But it’s bad manners to park people in the scorching sun for hours without any explanation or apology.

Maretlane and his people were behaving as if the tortuous wait was part of the schedule. 

Yet it wasn’t the lack of communication or the roasting that got Muckraker’s goat. 

Ladies who wanted to relieve themselves had to find some hiding spot in the veld because Maretlane didn’t find it reasonable to provide mobile toilets. When nature called they had to visit a gulley or squat behind a rock. There were not many rocks big enough to cover both the face and the big bums. 

If too scared to use the gully or rock you had to ask friends to shield you from the crowd. 

And that was the source of Muckraker’s irritation. Maretlane forced Muckraker and her friends to be toilet walls. That humiliation of having to invite a congregation to a peeing session would persist for the next three days Maretlane unashamedly basked in the glory of having done something as part of our 200th Anniversary. Water was brought in lituntoana so Maretlane could be amused as we behaved like cattle at a watering hole.

Maretlane didn’t seem bothered because he was on a mission to make the most from the least effort. He had promised water and had delivered. 

 If you didn’t like how it was delivered you could tell it to the mountains or go hang. 

March on, this is not your mother’s house. Drink up and move it, lunch awaits across the mountains. After they finally dragged themselves to the lunch venue, they came face to face with the stinker Maretlane had been cooking while they dragged through mountains and valleys. 

Lunch was something that tasted like chicken but could have been easily mistaken for some newly invented type of rubber. It came with five chips, a piece of bread as hard as Weetbix and a salad that looked like it was about to pinch your nose. It was vulgar. 

Next was some fish smaller than the lemon that was supposed to season it. 

It was served with a sandwich that looked like some leftovers from last year’s walk.

The five chips and the threatening salad were there again, warning you against eating them. 

They were back again when Maretlane unveiled the foul-tasting hot dog.  

It was khemere all the way. By the way, there is nothing traditional, organic or healthy about that drink. The salt on the wound is that hikers paid M1 000 for those meals. The message was clear: we make you pay through the nose for kaka and then make you kaka in the bushes. Come again next year for Maretlane will do you dirty again!

Don’t expect Maretlane to have learned anything from that episode. 

He hasn’t learned in 17 years. 

Don’t try telling him anything. He is now too busy preparing to deliver another scandalously shoddy show next year. Muckraker will not be paying to be abused again. Never! 

Maretlane has eaten enough from her. It will take her months to relearn how to use a toilet again.

Nka! Ichuuuuuuuuuuuu
muckracker.post@gmail.com

 

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Muckraker

The market of rascals

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THE Market’s management is either high on something illegal or just reckless.
They could also be either proudly incompetent or simply daft.
Muckraker suspects they are high, reckless, incompetent and daft.
That is a heavy burden to carry but self-inflicted and deserved.

Their job is to feed tummies and quench thirsts but they believe they are capable of many jobs. In addition to cooking chickin, they fancy themselves to be detectives, expert witnesses, rape experts, psychologists, communication gurus, criminologists, prosecutors, CCTV analysts and many other things they conjure up in their small minds.
That much is lavishly clear from their crude statement reacting to a woman who alleges she was raped in their toilet last week.
Instead of just acknowledging the alleged incident, The Market was sweating to testify, analyse evidence, scrutinise footage and play judge.
They tell us the alleged victim arrived at the restaurant “heavily intoxicated” as if they had measured the alcohol content in her blood.
They say she had left an “unpaid bill” at another restaurant as if they were the Small Claims Court.
They claim CCTV footage shows the victim coming out of the toilets holding hands with her alleged attacker as if they are certain that the handholding was consensual and not one dragging the other. Make no mistake about the sinister motive behind those salacious details sprinkled all over the statement.
They were gathering wood for a pyre to burn the woman and her allegations.
Their demented reasoning is something like this: she could not have been raped because she was intoxicated, absconded her bill down the street and was holding hands with the alleged attacker. None of those things have been proven and they might be just shameless lies told by uncouth characters.
The point, accepted by everyone else except some nincompoops, is that The Market should not have mentioned anything about a bill or intoxication. They are not just trivialising her serious allegations but also calling her a drunk who dodges bills and lies about being raped.
They do this by telling what they believe to be a cogent tale to illustrate that her story is incredible.
Muckraker read that clumsy statement several times and each time she was further disgusted by both the writer and The Market as a business.
They say the gentleman from another restaurant who is “well known to The Market staff” claimed that the woman had left an unpaid bill. That is not some random anecdote but an attempt to justify why they allowed him into the bar after they had closed.
It could also be a flimsy attempt at saying the man could not have violated the woman because he is “well known” to them.
As soon as the narration started Muckraker knew The Market was on an evil path.
And boy, did they march with vigour.
They say while the two were discussing the unpaid bill, the victim “indicated that she needed the bathroom”. Then comes the killer line in the statement: “Moments later, the said gentleman also walked to the bathroom, where after a while they both emerged holding hands”.
The public is invited to conclude that the discussion about the unpaid bill was resolved in the toilet and the two “emerged holding hands”.
In other words, whatever was said or happened in the toilet was so mutual that a debt was settled and hands were held.
The victim blaming and bashing could have ended there but The Market was just getting started.
After social media clobbered them for their callous and inept statement, The Market came back with a second one pretending to be correcting the first one.
This time they tried to sanitise the first statement by weeding out the offensive parts but avoided withdrawing the first statement and sincerely apologising to the woman.
They forget that people will never unlearn what they learned from the first statement and are most likely to read the second statement as an update rather than a correction.
But just like that, The Market thinks they have dodged the bullet so they can go back to their cooking and notorious upselling.
Their message to women is stinging: “It’s your funeral if you run away from a bill and get raped in our toilets. We will protect ourselves and the suspects at all costs. For good measure, we will tell the public you enjoyed free drinks and got so drunk that you made allegations of rape against our friend who was only trying to get you to pay”.
Muckraker will not speculate on what happened but can say, without fear or favour, that The Market’s management are unmitigated and unrepentant rascals. Only a business managed by accredited scoundrels reacts with such brazen thuggery to allegations of rape on its premises. Muckraker didn’t say CHE accredits scoundrels but that the mischief exhibited by The Market is of such high quality that it deserves a certification of sorts and at a higher level. It’s Level 8 stuff.
Nka! Ichuuuuuuuuuuuu
muckracker.post@gmail.com

 

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Muckraker

The Market of nonsense

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You are wrong if you think The Market’s statement about the alleged rape in their toilets is just terrible public relations or some error of judgment.
The statement reflects society’s attitude towards rape victims and women in general. That much is clear in the statement’s tone.

The statement says the alleged victim was “heavily intoxicated” but the truth is that its author was drunk from both something illegal and prejudice.
Even someone who had drunk all the beer, ciders, cocktails, whisky, gin and brandy in The Market would not come up with such a statement. This is top-notch BS rehearsed over years and expertly mastered. The Makhadzi dance to the alleged victim’s trauma.
But there is more to show their contempt for the alleged victim.
The one-page statement mentions the alleged victim’s name five times. Five!
It has 11 sentences and mentions the victim’s name in five of them.
It is unethical to mention rape victims by name but The Market did it anyway because they probably wanted to remind everyone that she is “that woman”.
You can bet your last January kobo that some dunderheads will justify naming her on the basis that she had already identified herself by posting the incident on social media. Nonsense!
The Market had no right to identify her by name in their statement.
They didn’t seek her consent. And even if they did, it’s still unethical.
To see that mentioning her name five times was not an innocent mistake you have to check how many times the statement mentions her alleged attacker‘s name. Zero!
This is despite that the alleged victim had revealed his name, or at least part of it, on social media. They call him “a staff member of one of the establishments at Maseru” and a “gentleman”.
They don’t even say the man is from one of the establishments at Maseru Mall because that would instantly narrow the list and expose him.
So they resort to saying “Maseru” as if Maseru City is synonymous with Maseru Mall. The idea was to keep his identity as vague as possible. Even if the alleged victim had not mentioned his name The Market knew him because the statement says he is “well known to The Market staff”.
There is a method to the madness here. The Market was at pains to protect the alleged attacker while loudly shouting the victim’s name. Ideally, neither the victim nor the suspect should have been mentioned by name. She is a victim of rape and the suspect was yet to appear in court.
Those with an eye for detail might have also noticed that The Market unashamedly tries to pretend to have suddenly discovered the woman’s rape allegations on her Facebook page. She reported to their staff soon after the alleged incident.
Muckraker will end this depressing story with one more observation.
The Market’s statement mentions “toilets” as if they have many toilets.
The reality is that it’s one toilet for men and women. The main entrance is the same and so is the washing area.
On busy nights you can use either of the cubicles. Muckraker has seen men budging into the women’s cubicle and vice-versa. “Hona le motho!” is a common scream in that toilet.
Muckraker has bumped into men with open zips and women pulling up their pants in the washing area. Women fixing their bras bump heads with men tucking in their shirts.
Whoever designed that toilet has a brain the size of the punctuation mark at the end of this sentence.
There are no words for those who thought it fit to be used by their patrons.
Nka! Ichuuuuuuuuuuuu
muckracker.post@gmail.com

 

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