No grave, but the spirit of JZ
After angering the entire nation two weeks ago when he called South Africans “izinunu”, or monsters, the retired Nunu with many hats made a guest appearance in parliament this week for a few episodes of the reality series Cops vs Cops, starring Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi as the good guy and Lt-Gen Shadrack Sibiya and his boss, suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu, as the villains. Cele the Entertainer was in his element.
When an MP asked him whether his continued involvement in and comment on matters policing — even though he’s no longer minister — is not tantamount to ruling from the grave, General Nunu curtly answered, “I don’t have a grave, so I cannot rule from the grave.”
Hogarth knows only one other semi-retired politician who answers questions in the same fashion, and he is on a smallholding somewhere in Nkandla. Maybe Nunu really meant it when he told MPs, “JZ is my commander.”
Get your tongue around this
He was not done. When IFP MP Albert Mncwango made reference to a letter to deputy national police commissioner Lt-Gen Tebello Mosikili, General Nunu corrected his pronunciation of the surname. “It’s Mosikili. I know you are a Zulu, but it is Mosikili, ‘l’ is ‘d’ in Sotho,” General Nunu told his fellow Zulu.
Mncwango looked surprised. He must have missed those Ubuntu-Botho classes his party used to force those who studied under the erstwhile KwaZulu government to take back in the day.
Right now, only later
But General Nunu, a school teacher by training, was not the only one to dish out some language lessons to the parliamentary committee members. Mchunu, who also spent almost a decade working in high schools, arrived in the house last week armed with dictionary definitions of the words “associate” and “comrade”. Hogarth was quite impressed by the distinction he made between the two words. However, the suspended minister’s dictionary seemed to fail him when it came to the word “immediately”.
So contrary to what is accepted as the meaning of the term ‘immediately’ was his definition that an MK Party MP remarked: “It is only you and General Sibiya who believe that ‘immediately’ means ‘slow’ or ‘later’.”
Call it by its name
But despite protests from MPs from all parties, the suspended minister kept on returning to his definition, forcing the frustrated committee chair, Soviet Lekganyane, to caution him and committee members not to take parliament back to the dark days when members used to debate whether a swimming pool was a “fire pool”.
“A swimming pool must be a swimming pool and not a fire pool, and ‘immediately’ must mean ‘immediately’, now!” cried out Lekganyane.
Where was he when the country needed him during the Nine Wasted Years?
A whole lotta love
A sideshow at the ad hoc committee meeting this week was the constant bickering between EFF boss Julius Malema and the MKP’s Sibonelo Nomvalo. Their arguing got so bad at one stage that Lekganyane thought the only way to guarantee peace was to go romantic.
After a short speech about the need for decorum, Lekganyane looked at the two MPs and said: “I love you Honourable Malema, I love you Honourable Nomvalo.”
Next time he should bring them roses, one red and the other green.
Killing the fuzzy vibe
Amid all that loving, General Nunu reminded MPs just how brazen he could be. Responding to a question from the EFF about an affidavit from someone who provided it under protected disclosure, and which makes damning allegations about Cele and his links to corruption, the general went on to reveal the person’s name and said, “She also said I wanted to kill her. And she is not dead.”
“Are you saying that if you say you are going to kill someone, you are going to kill them?” interjected an MP.
“If I wanted to kill her, she would be dead. She is not dead,” replied Nunu.
And not one honourable member objected to this veiled threat from a former cabinet minister.
No domestic bliss in the USA
It’s been too quiet on the Afrikaner-American front, so Hogarth was grateful to learn from The Washington Post how the world’s most well-heeled refugees are doing over there in the land of the so-called free.
According to the newspaper, even though the US government insists there is a white genocide here, it can only take 7,500 of the millions of allegedly suffering Afrikaners.
But what really drew Hogarth’s attention was this quote from one of the first Amerikaners, Charl Kleinhaus: “The biggest challenge is here you work, hey. There’s no kitchen lady you call to sweep the house, or clean the house, or stuff like that. You do the work yourself.”
It sounds like the guy misses home.
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