At a friend’s wedding last year Muckraker watched in awe as one man stole the show on the dance floor. As the song ended Muckraker hurried to the man.
“Are you from the bridegroom’s or the bride’s side,” she asked curiously.
“None of the above, silly woman! I came here for booze, food and dance. You are a fool if you needed an invitation to come here. kkkkkkkkkk,” said the man as went back to his dancing.
Muckraker had been cut to size. Not even her borrowed stilettos could help.
But out of that hilarious humiliation came a lesson she will always remember: those who dance too much at public gatherings have either gate-crashed or are dead broke. That’s just the way it is: the uninvited dance like there is no tomorrow. More importantly, the broke ones just dance harder.
It’s as if they are making up for not contributing to the food and the drinks. They are dancing their way to insobriety. Perhaps that is their way of paying for their freeloading.
Yet it doesn’t mean they are good dancers, but just that they dance with gusto. Those who have power, money and status have no time to dance like they are hearing music for the first time in their lives. They also know that there are people who are employed to dance.
You cannot make a hobby out of other people’s jobs. Never perform for free what others are doing for money because that will cause unemployment. But the real reason is that power and status have a way to robbing its beholders of the little sweet things of life.
It’s not only the privilege of dancing without care that you lose. Even the little delicacies, the aimless straws, the bellowing in the shower and loud laughs tend to disappear when you have a little power and status.
For instance, a boss will not just go about hopping from one shebeen to the next even if that is what used to give him pleasure when he was a nonentity.
Muckraker is talking from experience. Before becoming a powerful columnist she used to enjoy her mug of hopose once in a while. Her happiest moments were when she gobbled the murky liquor and bum jived to the sound of Sanko from a shrieking radio.
Those days are gone. Blame it on power.
Chief Justice Nthomeng Majara probably likes a treat of makoenya but she can no longer hunt for them in the bus stop area. Power and status!
Justice Semapo Peete used to enjoy perambulating the bus stop area when he was a mere lawyer but now he cannot even dream of going there.
Not that the people’s judge has become aloof. It’s just that there are certain areas people of status should not traverse even if they miss them (He had an office there and he was a damn good lawyer but rumour has it that his fees were too cheap).
Size Two entered adulthood on the sounds of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. His age mates say he was not a bad dancer.
“A bit stiff but not terrible at all,” one friend of his recently told Muckraker with a chuckle.
“He had the moves,” said another friend with whom he shared the naughty moments of boyhood.
Some fifty years later you cannot imagine Size Two taking to the dance floor.
Blame that on power. Even when he tries to dance at rallies you can see he is faking it for political reasons. He barely moves his legs, just swerving slowly like a gumtree in an August wind.
It’s just depressing watching him dance. Even when he returned to power after three years in political Siberia Size Two did not dance. Power had robbed him of his dance moves.
But if you had been observing carefully you would have noticed that while Size Two has lost his moves he has mastered another dance.
The man can dance with his mouth. Before he was yanked from power in 2012 Size Two used to spank people with his mouth. He would insult, mock and chide.
The man has a way of digging deep into the Sesotho language for the most stinging of insults. He can hit you with an idiom your grandmother has never heard. In those days his targets were the opposition leaders and those who thought the congress movement was a spent force.
As fate would have it Size Two misspoke his way out of power. In Roma, he spent his sabbatical watching sunsets and whistling into the air. We in Maseru thought he was finished.
In his place we had installed Uncle Tom and DJ Waters, a combination that proved toxic for the country. Less than a thousand days later Size Two was back but this time he was not lashing out at people. Instead he was confessing that lack of power had humbled him. Indeed he sounds humble these days, keeping his idioms to himself.
Yet the real reason why Size Two’s mouth is not dancing on political opponents is because he has foreign commitments. For the past two years his mouth has been dancing at SADC meetings.
Next week he has an appointment to dance again at the SADC Summit in Mbabane and you can be sure he will deliver a good show.
Once again he will try to dance his way out of problems. He will tell them with a straight face that all is well in Lesotho, the opposition are a bunch of unmitigated liars, the civic society is biased and the people of Maseru are gossipers. Journalists, he will say, are zealots on steroids.
When they ask what progress had been made he will point to a small workshop held a few weeks ago to show that things are moving. If they ask about the opposition leaders he will say they are sore losers looking for sympathy from the international community.
And how about the investigation into Mahao’s death? Ah, eh, eish, that one is being looked into, he will say. When will that other guy leave office?
“Ah comrades, I totally forgot about that one. Let me see if I can ask him to leave nicely,” Size Two will say while reaching for a glass of water.
As usual the SADC leaders will fall for his dancing mouth hook, line and sinker. At the end of it all they will dispatch another communiqué.
Muckraker has stopped reading those communiqués because they say nothing and amount to nothing.
Frankly, Size Two has been putting on spectacular shows at the SADC meetings. He knows how to please that crowd. The only time he was booed off the stage was in January in Botswana when his song was out of tune.
SADC wanted him to take the Phumaphi Report but some people in his coalition government had whispered wrong things into his ears. Pissed with his performance, his comrades threatened to unleash a long whip on him. They said Lesotho will be kicked out of the regional shebeen (That is what SADC is).
It did not take long for Size Two to crawl back to the leaders. He embraced the report and promised to sprint on its recommendations. Once back home he took a magnifying glass, read the report and proceeded to shred it line by line. The idioms were back.
Six months later he was back at another meeting, putting on a performance of his life. His comrades nodded in agreement. The opposition tried to sneak in their agenda but the leaders frowned on them. Once again the man from Tsoelike had talked his way out of trouble.
It’s good that we have Uncle Ramaphosa, SADC’s postman to Lesotho. Like a postman, Ramaphosa has no opinion of the news he delivers. His job is to listen and pass on the message, bad and good. Over the years he has delivered love letters and divorce papers.
The only thing he has not delivered is a solution. And that’s because that has never been part of his job description. The solution has to come from our squabbling politicians. Keep dreaming if think they will rise above the school ground brawls. Dance Size Two, dance! To the left, to the right, to the left, to the right, now get down.
This too shall come to pass and soon you will be able to pelt the opposition with your idioms.
Your idioms shall fall on them like hailstorm.
Now it’s your time to squirm. Safe journey to Mbabane.
Nka! Ichuuuuuuuuu!
muckraker.post@gmail.com
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