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Muckraker

Jokers are in the house

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HERE 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

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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