HOGARTH | Ace lowers his sights — a lot

Prospects as drab as the Vaal

Once upon a time there was a man called Elias “Ace” Magashule. He was a high-flying politician with an insatiable hunger for power. As premier of a tiny province, he wasn’t satisfied with lording it over the City of Roses and its immediate surroundings. So he got himself elected secretary-general of the country’s largest party, in the hope of using the post as a springboard to the Union Buildings.

But he fell out with the powers that be and left the party to set up his own stall. On election day, his party attracted a handful of votes — not even enough to make him a backbencher in the National Assembly.

So, he headed back to the Free State, where he is starting afresh — this time seeking to be made mayor of Parys, his birth town on the Vaal River.

From media mogul to menial

Way back then when Ace was Free State premier, one Mzwanele Manyi was named as the new proprietor of a media empire that included a 24-hour news channel, ANN7, and The New Age newspaper. The experience was short-lived as the Guptas, the family that “sold” the assets to him, soon had to flee the country when their friend, the Nkandla Crooner, was kicked out of the Union Buildings. During his short stint as the owner of “the means of production”, capitalist Manyi counted among his staff one Sifiso Mahlangu who was political editor at ANN7.

Many years later, when both had stopped pretending to be media people and had joined the Nkandla Crooner’s new political outfit, the MK Party Manyi continued with life as if he were still the boss, freely giving media interviews without first asking for permission from Mahlangu, the official MKP spokesman.

And so Mahlangu wrote Manyi a letter this week reminding him who is the boss now. Not even the Nkandla Crooner could save the former media mogul.

MKP supporters swear this is all part of an elaborate chess game being played by their leader to keep everybody on their toes

Musical chairs on the deck of the Titanic

Still on the MKP, Baba kaDuduzane has struck again. Just five months after fetching a promising MP, Sibonelo Nomvalo, from Cape Town to make him the party’s eighth secretary-general, Baba has changed his mind again. This week he stripped Nomvalo of his secretarial powers and dissolved the “presidential task team” he had created before Easter and replaced it with a new “strategic presidential team” — made up of completely new people.

MKP supporters swear this is all part of an elaborate chess game being played by their leader to keep everybody on their toes. Hogarth suspects they’ll only realise the truth the day he decides to disband the whole party and deny he was ever a member of it, not to mention its leader.

When the US can’t find its sh*tholes

Hogarth initially dismissed it as what the Orange One calls fake news, but it turns out the US state department has owned up to what it calls “an unfortunate error”. At an HIV/Aids conference in Brazil recently, the department had a slide presentation that put Mozambique in the Horn of Africa, Cameroon in Southern Africa and presented Nigeria as a landlocked country.

Hogarth can only hope that the warlike Americans don’t plan to bomb any country on the continent soon — they might end up destroying a totally different nation from the one they are targeting.

Rather try cowboys and crooks, Donny

Speaking of US bombs, the Orange One seems to have learned only this week just how fast missiles are. Briefing journalists at the White House, Donald Trump sounded like an excited schoolboy as he revealed his latest discovery. “The other day you read that five missiles were shot. They were going 8,600 miles an hour. Think of it: 8,600 miles an hour, and they were big missiles, and they were shot at Jordan. And our guys were there, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Five bing, bing, bing, bing, bing…” And this is the man Americans trust to carry the “nuclear football” and its special codes?

Idac folk have a way with words

After Idac boss Andrea Johnson’s six-day testimony at the Madlanga commission, which she later described as a “sh*tshow”, it was the turn of one of her investigators to tell the commissioners what he knows.

Senior investigator Mantsha Raphesu has no time to sugarcoat anything; he tells it as he sees it. When he did not agree with his bosses about how they were following stipulations of one section of the law in conducting their investigations, Raphesu sent them an official email with a subject line that read: “Section What What”. How professional.