Muckraker
Unreformable and unrepentant
Published
2 years agoon
By
The PostIT is a notorious fact that our MPs are some of the laziest in the world. They sleep in parliament like their lives depend on it. As if those who don’t sleep will not get their salaries.
There are some MPs who never uttered a word in the last parliament.
You only hear their voices when they say “Amen” after prayers or when they say “I” to vote for things beyond the grasp of their shallow and empty minds. But if you want our MPs to pay attention you just have to threaten their bread. Their eyes shine like Apollo lights and ears open like Maseru’s potholes.
The recent reforms have just done that. It is not a secret that our politicians don’t like the reforms because they threaten their pastures. They come with drastic changes that make it impossible to dish out jobs to cronies and abuse state power.
The reforms clip the prime minister’s wings, making it tough for them to fire PS’ as if they are herdboys. They leave no room for pathetic losers to sneak into parliament with paltry votes.
This explains why the reforms have been frustrated.
Any politician who claims to wholeheartedly support the reforms is lying through the teeth. They can tell that gobbledygook to a mountain.
They will not announce their loathing for the reforms because that would make them look like saboteurs.
Lesotho’s politicians are generally unafraid to pull the middle finger on the people. They take us for granted. But the United States, SADC, EU and AU put the fear of God in them.
You can hear from their fawning statements at the meetings that they are more scared of the international community than their own people.
So instead of bellowing and railing against the reforms they would rather cook up some legal argument to block them. That is why some of them are now arguing that using the state of emergency power to recall parliament to pass the reforms will be a gross violation of the constitution.
Even some certified buffoons that cannot tell a clause from a section are now constitutional law experts. Those who cannot even spell their names under pressure are going through the constitution with a fine comb to find ways to block attempts to recall parliament.
They might be right but their newly found passion to defend the constitution is hypocritical and self-serving.
Every day the constitutional rights of the people of this country are violated while the same politicians remain mum and stand at akimbo. You don’t hear them screaming their lungs out when the police beat, torture and kill suspects.
They go on voicemail when thousands of Basotho go hungry.
Not a word from them when our children are denied education, a basic human right, because schools are either too far from their homes or their parents cannot afford them.
Very few of them had something to say when the NUL student was robbed of his right to life by the callous and trigger-happy police.
None of them raise a finger when hundreds of our people are killed by criminals. They shut up when suspects are denied the right to justice because of our dysfunctional courts.
The point is that the constitution of this country has been repeatedly and brazenly violated that it’s not worth the paper on which it is printed.
It has been shredded and peed on by the same politicians who are now claiming to be protecting it from those who want to violate it to get the reforms passed.
Nyoe, nyoe, nyoe the constitution is sacrosanct.
Blah, blah, blah, there is no state of emergency. Yeh right! But you have defecated on the same constitution with impunity. Cut the BS, recall parliament and pass the damn reforms.
It’s the least you can do to redeem your tattered reputation of fighting and sleeping in parliament.
Nka! Ichuuuuuuuuuuu!
muckraker.post@gmail.com
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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