Muckraker
Jokers are in the house
Published
5 years agoon
By
The PostHERE goes a joke doing rounds on social media. Uncle Tom visited the Queen of England for a heart-to-heart talk. Over tea, Uncle Tom asked the Queen: “Your Majesty, how do you run such an efficient government?
“It’s simple, you just appoint smart people into your government,” the Queen replied.
“Mmmmm, but how do you know they are smart people?”
Uncle Tom asked as he leaned forward, supposedly to glean some of the Queen’s wisdom.
“It’s simple. Just ask them a simple riddle and see how they answer,” the Queen said.
Uncle Tom shakes his head to show he is desperate for an illustration to completely understand the import of the Queen’s lesson. And as if on cue the Queen calls Teresa May.
“Teresa, your mother and father have a child who is neither your brother nor your sister. Who is that child?” asked the Queen.
Teresa smiles and says: “The child is me, your Majesty.”
“You see, this is what I am talking about,” the Queen said to Uncle Tom as Teresa May tiptoes out of the room.
Uncle Tom jumps with excitement and bids the Queen farewell, so sure that he has found the best way to check if his cabinet is brimming with dunderheads.
And as soon as he landed back home, Uncle Tom called Defence Minister Tefo Mapesela to his office. “Mapesela, your mother and father have a child neither your brother nor your sister. Who is that child?”
Mapesela looks at Uncle Tom with a blank face.
He tried to count his fingers but quickly remembers that Uncle Tom is asking for a name, not a number.
After five minutes, Mapesela hung his head on his shoulder and said to Uncle Tom: “Eish, ha ke shoo Mohlomphehi. E thata ntho ena. Give me four days to investigate.”
So Mapesela hunted for what he believed was an elusive answer. Because his friend Phori was not available, Mapesela went straight to Deputy Prime Minister Monyane Moleleki’s office.
“Ntate Moleleki, please help me with this riddle. Your mother and father have a child but it’s neither your brother nor your sister. Who is that child?”
“That’s simple young man. That child is me,” Moleleki says.
Two days later Mapesela walked into Uncle Tom’s office with a jump in his step. You know the spring that accompanies your step when you have the right answer.
“Ntate Prime Minister, I have the answer to that riddle,” Mapesela says.
“And what is the answer?” Uncle Tom asks.
“That child is Ntate Moleleki,” Mapesela says with a wide grin on his excited face.
Uncle Tom is horrified and bangs his desk. “Stupid Man, the child is not Moleleki but Teresa May. Now get the hell out of my office,” Uncle Tom says with a disgusted look on his face.
May good things come to whoever cooked this delicious joke.
We need such to survive this toxic little territory we call home.
But if you are not laughing you need prayers or an urgent brain surgery. Whatever your choice, may you be saved from yourself.
Muckraker has done the diagnosis but she won’t partake in your redemption. She is sick to the back teeth with trying to infuse some commonsense in this country that is hostile to logic.
Henceforth, she will just watch as suckers parade in the streets with gusto.
Her obsession with saving morons ended last Sunday after a brief interaction with three MPs. It was an unfortunate encounter because it left Muckraker depressed.
The loser, of course, is not Muckraker but the dimwits she has been trying to save for years.
They are on their own, thanks to the tosh the MPs puked in their brief chat with Muckraker. Adios!
Curiosity killed the cat, so goes the mundane saying every writer should avoid unless someone has a gun to their head.
Forgive Muckraker for using it because the absurdity in our parliament is like a gun to her head.
It’s a loaded gun to the rest of the country.
In that brief chat the three MPs had wrestled for a chance to describe what was going to happen to Uncle Tom on Monday.
“He is out,” said the one with a funny hair cut that looks like he had just shaved with an axe.
“This time we have him by the neck,” said the chubby one with a jacket so oversized that you would think he executed every tailor in the country.
“Kkkkkkkk, we are saying this time we got him by the b****,” said the tall one who obviously forgot to wipe mafi off his mouth.
“He is cornered,” said the hideous haircut chap.
The plump one chipped in: “His time is over. He is finished.”
Muckraker could hear Mr. Mafi-all-over-the-mouth howling with laughter as she walked away.
You may ask what contribution the blabbermouth called Muckraker made to that chat.
She nodded, faked a laugh, nodded again, yawned a bit and then invented an excuse to escape. When a woman says “nature calls” even the most foolish man knows she is desperate for some fresh air somewhere far from them. Sometimes you have to be uncouth to escape people who don’t read body language like a yawn.
The encounter only reinforced Muckraker’s view that the trouble with our politicians is that they have very little between their ears and they are a predictable bunch.
You can smell their schemes from miles away.
By the time they knock on your door to deliver what they suppose is a sucker punch your spear is already sharpened. For weeks, some MPs have been threatening to upend Uncle Tom’s government with a no confidence motion.
They were all over radio stations, threatening thunder and fury when parliament opens.
The gullible masses were sold on that one-legged tactic. Journalists, always the naïve tribe, went into frenzy as they tried to give oomph to a plan even goats knew was going to fail.
It was obvious to anyone with a brain the size of a rosehip fruit that the MPs were galloping to their own failure.
And indeed they hit a brick wall on Monday.
Boom! Oh, boom!
There was some shouting, screaming and cursing from the benches but the wheels to the inevitable were in motion.
The Speaker pocked holes into the ‘confidence motion’ until all that remained were words that sounded like gibberish. The motion was flawed both legally and procedurally, the Speaker said to a stunned horde of MPs who, until that point, thought they were brandishing a machine gun against Uncle Tom.
As the MPs fumed the Speaker twisted the knife in their bums by announcing that the parliament will adjourn sine die.
That another way to say parliament has been closed till-I-don’t-care-when.
Soon the MPs were trooping out of parliament wearing long faces.
Once again, they have been defeated.
They will have to wait for another four months to cook up another plot.
Yet you can be sure that even those four months are not enough time to contrive a fresh strategy. They will still rehash the same motion with another mistake the Speaker can exploit to sabotage it with another sine die.
The merry-go-round will persist for the next two years or so as the MPs keep flogging this dead donkey. Meanwhile Uncle Tom, Feslady, his cahoots and a band of bootlickers will be running the show.
Over the next four months they will try to use two more strategies that are bound to dismally fail. The first is to scream at Uncle Tom to reopen parliament.
The MPs call this “pressure” because they labour under the illusion that Uncle Tom gives a rat’s about what the public thinks of him.
“Open the parliament. Just open it!” they will say.
Uncle Tom will not open a parliament planning his ouster. He might not have understood the Queen’s riddle but he knows when a train is about to ram him.
He is old, not stupid.
When the ‘pressure’ strategy fails they will move to the third phase of the tactic: begging SADC to intervene. This is always their last resort. It’s what we do here: fight, fight, fight, fight and then ask strangers to mediate.
Muckraker is sure that this route too will fail because this is not 2014.
Circumstances have changed. There are skirmishes in the government but none terrible enough to worry SADC. There are no visible fights among the coalition partners.
The military has largely stayed in the barracks where it should remain until called upon to dig some trenches, build bridges and clear snow in the mountains (These people are trained to ignore pain but never get to do any hard work).
The police are largely content after being pampered with a six percent salary increase when every other civil servant got zero.
What threatens the government is the chaos in the ABC but that cannot be reason enough for SADC to step in.
The allegation that the Feslady is meddlesome has no place on the regional bloc’s agenda.
For as long as there is no evidence that little Lesotho is about to implode SADC will watch from a distance.
There will be a last ditch attempt to invite SADC’s attention by claiming that the parliament’s closure is derailing the so called reforms. That too is an inane argument because what has sabotaged the reforms is not parliament but lack of political will.
In any case, there is no evidence that SADC is still as obsessed with the reforms as it was three years ago. But even if it is, the lack of progress is not reason enough for SADC to intervene.
So this battle to remove Uncle Tom is going to be a long one.
It will not be won until the MPs stop using what remains of their brains after thinking about the interest free loans, trips, allowances and which nyatsi to visit tonight. Muckraker hopes there is still something between those 60 pairs of ears.
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MUCKRAKER has been waiting for our MPs to explain why they want a M75 000 salary.
She hoped somewhere in the sewage the MPs were spraying as justification for their attempt to rob us blind was some reasonable argument.
Just something to show that there was some sort of method to their rank madness and shameless greed.
Sadly, Muckraker has been waiting for Godot because none had emitted anything showing that they carry a brain bigger than the punctuation mark that ends this sentence.
Instead, we have been treated to some of the most inane arguments proving beyond all reasonable doubt that our parliament is full to the brim with imbeciles masquerading as MPs.
Thanks to Mokherane Tsatsanyane, that one who came into parliament through the window while dressed in DC colours, we now know we are being led by slow minds.
After reminding us that MPs “run this country” and are a special breed, Tsatsanyane went to the meat of his bizarre argument.
“He! He! Mokherane is crazy, he wants M75 000! That’s what people will be saying. But I have just spent almost M5 million in my area. I bought 40 wheelchairs at Moshoeshoe II, one wheelchair costs M3 000, that means I have spent something like M300 000,” he emitted while frothing at the mouth as if someone stole his goat.
It is tempting to follow his argument to its finality just to be sure his mouth has pulled the middle finger on his brain but that is obvious.
His problem is that he just can’t do simple arithmetic.
It is impossible to spend M300 000 after buying 40 wheelchairs at M3 000 each. It can’t!
He was inflating his numbers and ego just like he wants us to pay him an inflated salary. The other possibility is that he was just entangled in the web of his lies. They say liars must have good memories. Muckraker would add that they should learn to count as well.
At that moment, someone should have told Tsatsanyane to stop telling tall tales but the man was now on fire. After all, he thought he had just gotten away with the lie that 40 multiplied by 3 000 is 300 000.
So he pushed on.
“They are happy and celebrating, He! He! Mokherane is donating wheelchairs and food parcels. In a day you can spend around M400 000 when you are an MP helping people. But tomorrow when you want an increment, they complain.”
Muckraker wanted to call Tsatsanyane to deliver some crude words but remembered that his kind is beyond redemption.
The critical question is what kind of grade he smokes. The one from Mapoteng is not that potent. It takes a special kind of high for someone who claims to be spending M400 000 a day on charity to shed a Maqalika of tears over M75 000 per month.
But his lies and hallucinations are not the crux of the matter.
The question is who invited him to be in parliament.
More precisely, who voted for him?
Expect a blank face instead of an answer because he was neither invited nor elected.
The people of Qoaling rejected him in the last election and he only sneaked into parliament via the proportional representation list.
Now this unwanted, unelected, and unelectable nonentity is telling us that M75 000 is “nothing to write home about”.
So why cry for it like a hired mourner?
Even if it’s a small amount, you still don’t deserve it here and in heaven.
Hear, hear, hear, a man who claims to have just spent “almost M5 million” in his “area” is complaining about being underpaid.
You cannot make this up.
Even if his salary is increased to M75 000, Tsatsanyane will not earn M5 million over his five years in parliament. At the current salary of M40 000, he will earn M2.4 million over five years.
There are five logical explanations for his alleged spending habits.
He could be filthy rich, extremely generous, reckless, bad with mathematics or just a pathological liar.
What is clear is that no amount of lying, screaming or flawed reasoning will help the MPs get the M75 000. This time it won’t happen.
Gone are the days when these lazybones would make threats to get away with evil deeds. There will be no increase for those freeloading impostors.
Nada!
Those who feel underpaid should surrender their seats and leave us in peace. Muckraker can bet her last kobo that their absence will not be missed. Most of them can even be replaced with donkeys and there will still be no real effect on the quality of parliament’s work.
MPs who mourn about being paid less than their counterparts in South Africa are free to cross Mohokare River and contest.
As for those who believe they can jerk up their salaries to recover what they used to campaign, Muckraker says: Go hang! The ropes are on Muckraker.
Muckraker warns anyone who is even thinking of entertaining the MPs’ demands that there will be chaos in this country.
Some furniture will fly, bones broken and someone will run.
This is not a threat but a promise.
Bring it on! We are sick and tired of a few people defecating on us.
Muckraker will not be having a wet weekend because she is going to the gym. You know why. It’s about time we get fit to deal with nonsonso.
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.
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.
Instead of just acknowledging the alleged incident, The Market was sweating to testify, analyse evidence, scrutinise footage and play judge.
They say she had left an “unpaid bill” at another restaurant as if they were the Small Claims Court.
They were gathering wood for a pyre to burn the woman and her allegations.
They do this by telling what they believe to be a cogent tale to illustrate that her story is incredible.
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.
As soon as the narration started Muckraker knew The Market was on an evil path.
And boy, did they march with vigour.
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.
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.
But just like that, The Market thinks they have dodged the bullet so they can go back to their cooking and notorious upselling.
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