Sweaty General Julius Mkhwanazi was at it again this week as he reappeared before the Madlanga commission. This time he was not gulping down tens of litres of bottled water, but he was still sweating buckets.
As the questions from the commission intensified, Mkhwanazi sweated so much he was forced to constantly wipe his face with tissues. However, part of one of the tissues ended up stuck to his forehead, to which he seemed oblivious.
The image has gone so viral that even the UK’s Independent newspaper and other international publications have reported on it. Soon the image will be a worldwide meme for anyone spinning a yarn — the social media era’s version of Pinocchio. Mkhwanazi should bring a big towel with him the next time he appears before the commission — or, as Hogarth suspects, in a court after his arrest on Saturday.
Grand bemusement
Mkhwanazi may also want to rethink how he answers the questions put to him, because the way he is doing it now may get him into a lot of trouble in future. In a bid to explain how he ended up calling a woman 10 years his senior his mother and two elderly people appearing on his birth certificate as his mother and father his grandparents, the Ekurhuleni chief initially gave the commission an explanation that left everyone bemused.
“I don’t think they are my grandparents. When the stepmother came to my father, she found my granny there … I don’t think they are my grandparents. That grandmother raised me up until she [the stepmother] came in.”
A confused evidence leader then asked: “But if they are not your grandparents, what are they?”
Mkhwanazi replied: “I am saying they are — I don’t think they are … You said, ‘I think they are.’ I don’t think — they are.”
Couldn’t he just have said he had no doubt they were his grandparents, but that home affairs, as with many black families under apartheid, got the details wrong?
From Sea Point to soul food
From Cape Town seafood, sushi and pizza to pap and vleis. That’s proving to be the journey of new DA leader and Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, who is popularly known as “GHL” in blue-party circles. During a lunch break on the campaign trail in Gauteng, Atteridgeville DA boy Solly Msimanga took GHL and Gogo Helen Zille to a genuine shisanyama.
It must be said, the DA prince looked a tad out of place, handling his pap as if it were a slice of pizza or bread. Blue-party backers were not impressed. “Solly, can I just ask you something? Can you please show Geordin how to eat pap?” begged one DA supporter.
Msimanga intervened, showing GHL how to ball up the maize meal before taking a bite. Welcome to life up north, GHL!
Time of the ‘turncoat’
President Cyril Ramaphosa has AfriForum and other right-wing groups up in arms because he appointed his fly-fishing buddy and retired Afrikaner nationalist politician Roelf Meyer as his ambassador to the US.
Fully understanding that Meyer is Cupcake’s Trump card (pun intended) when it comes to convincing the US public that white Afrikaners are not being persecuted in South Africa, right-wingers went into overdrive this week, calling the former National party minister and chief negotiator a “turncoat” and a has-been.
Would they have preferred it if the president had chosen a present-day Afrikaner politician such as, er, Carl Niehaus?
Alternative facts keep flowing
Cupcake’s choice seems to be worrying the right wing in the US too. Not long after the announcement that Meyer would be US envoy, Pretoria-born US multibillionaire Elon Musk doubled down on claims of anti-white racism in South Africa, repeating his false claim that his Starlink company isn’t allowed to operate here because he is white. Musk has since been backed up by Donald Trump himself.
On Friday, entirely unprovoked, the Orange One threw a tantrum over our fledgling democracy, telling a crowd he had suspended all “third-world migration” to and refugee resettlement in the US, “except for persecuted” white South Africans.
“In South Africa, there is a very horrible thing going on … It’s a genocide, it’s a horrible thing … They kill people if they are white … [In] South Africa, they kill white farmers.”
This from a man who recently posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ and then lied about it, claiming he thought the image depicted him as a medical doctor saving lives. Who still believes this lying head of state?
Pulp parody
As if the image and the subsequent lie weren’t bad enough, Trump’s “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth — a self-styled Christian nationalist — stunned many at a Pentagon prayer session when he quoted lines from a Quentin Tarantino movie script as if they were from the Bible.
Rallying US soldiers to support Trump’s “holy war” in Iran, Hegseth asked those with him in the room to join him in prayer — as he read out lines made famous by a character played by the famously foul-mouthed Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
Trump fiction, anyone?
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