A nice and easy fascist
Having decided to put his government in splendid isolation by boycotting the G20 Summit this weekend, US President Donald Trump had to avoid what the young ones call FOMO (fear of missing out) by making himself new friends.
With all the world leaders of significance either in Johannesburg or busy with other assignments, the Orange One had to find a leader of some stature in the US. That happened to be Zohran Mamdani, New York’s mayor-elect and a self-proclaimed democratic socialist.
In the past, the two have had some nasty things to say about each other, but on Friday, they decided to play nice. So nice that when a journalist asked Mamdani if he thought Trump was “a fascist”, Trump politely interjected and told Mamdani: “That’s okay, you can say yes, it’s easier…“ So a smiling Mamdani responded, “Yes.”
With Trump being so magnanimous towards people who call him names, maybe we should send our expelled ambassador Ebrahim Rasool back to Washington.
More difficult to pronounce
Maintaining the startling version of himself that had White House reporters agog, Trump skipped the chance of having a dig of his own at Mamdani when another journalist asked him: “Do you think you are standing next to a jihadist right now in the Oval Office?”
“No, I don’t,” said Trump.
Explaining later why one of his party faithful had called Mamdani a jihadist, he said: “You say things sometimes in a campaign.”
Perhaps she mixed up the names
But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt clearly didn’t get the “play nice” memo. After President Cyril Ramaphosa revealed that the US government was backtracking on Trump’s decree that no US official would participate in the G20 Summit, an angry Leavitt told reporters that Ramaphosa was “running his mouth” and “falsely claiming” things. “That language isn’t appreciated by President Trump,” she said. Given that her boss is famous for “running his mouth” and making false claims, that seemed a bit rich.
A right royal agent
The Americans may not have been in South Africa this week, but they featured prominently in our national discourse, thanks to self-styled intelligence agent Brown Mogotsi. The “spy”, perhaps hoping to deflect attention from his own shady behaviour, tried to startle the nation with a bombshell, “revealing” to the Madlanga commission that Zulu King Misuzulu kaZwelithini is a “CIA agent”.
Hogarth was disappointed that the commission didn’t ask agent Mogotsi if his claim wasn’t based on this picture, which makes the monarch look like someone trying to go deep undercover to infiltrate a 1990s gangster rap group.
From Prof to Dr to Ms
Meanwhile, one of the other people accused of misleading the seemingly impressionable Senzo Mchunu, Mary de Haas, made her much anticipated appearance before the parliamentary ad hoc committee investigating the same issues as the Madlanga commission. Hogarth doesn’t remember much of her evidence but recalls that when she first took her seat, committee members were calling her professor. By lunchtime, they were referring to her as Dr De Haas after learning that she was attached to no university and had earned no professorship. By the evening, even her status as “Dr” had come under scrutiny and she admitted not having completed her PhD. By the time she went home, the MPs were calling her “Ms De Haas”.
Mchunu’s grave mistake
The testimonies by Mogotsi, De Haas and Mchunu’s chief of staff, Cedrick Nkabinde, reminded Hogarth that Mchunu — who had connections with all three — has a history of taking decisions based on information from questionable sources.
In March 2015, this newspaper reported that Mchunu — who was KwaZulu-Natal premier at the time — had announced the existence of a “mass grave” on the South Coast where hundreds of prison labourers were buried. He went as far as asking then president Jacob Zuma to launch an inquiry into the gravesite, which was said to be located at a farm in Dududu.
After extensive investigation and excavation efforts, no evidence of mass graves was found on the farm. It turned out that Mchunu had based his claim on a sangoma’s “vision”.
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