Dear Mr Ebrahim Patel,
I heard that you and some of your colleagues are planning a major rethink of our economical system. This is great news! I would like to take part in the Big Economic Debate! Even though I know very little about economics (ignorance about this topic has not prevented Mr Malema from voicing his views, though, why should it stop me?).
In fact, the only authoritative thing I can say for certain about the economy is that I like the free market system but that I hate McDonald’s, which, I guess, sort of puts me somewhere in the middle between Jeremy Cronin and that guy with the toothy boyish grin from Virgin whose name I can never remember.
Of course, our country already has no shortage of plans, ideas and grand schemes, but we seem to be strangely lacking on the implementation scoreboard. For instance, has anyone fixed that place where people can look into the ladies’ restrooms at the Cape Town soccer stadium? Or is it still at the bottom of somebody’s “To Do” list? I haven’t been there myself — I got stuck in a taxi protest and sadly missed the last mass prayer meeting by several days, so, regrettably, I haven’t been able to try and peer into the ladies’ restroom myself yet.
However, I do have a few practical suggestions to make to your advisory board, Mr Patel. I hope you guys will consider my very down-to-earth proposals. These proposals, if implemented, are bound to change things on a grassroots level, and greatly improve the living quality of the masses.
Firstly, I think we should nationalise the South African sex industry. I think sex workers are a vital part of our nation’s national assets. Besides, we need something to focus on in the event of Bafana Bafana being knocked out early in the competition. Also, we need to keep the millions of visitors from abroad happy once they realise that, having arrived at OR Tambo airport, all their luggage had been stolen and they can no longer afford to fly to Cape Town for the next match. Or vice versa.
I realise there is the danger that demand might exceed supply, but, should we run out of local sex workers, we could always import some from elsewhere. I mean, we used to import doctors from Cuba, didn’t we? I was doing some freelance spying for the ANCYL about a certain journalist — Anastasia de Vries, the new Book Page editor of Rapport — and landed, completely by accident, right in the middle of a fascinating website called www.anastasiadate.com which advertises “1000s of Russian women” made to order. Since Russian women seem to be easily affordable, and presumably not as corrupt as their capitalistically orientated Western counterparts, I can envisage them coming to the aid of our sex industry without damaging anyone’s moral fibre or tempting our own comrades into all sorts of new forms of Western decadence. God knows, we have enough of that, with so many folk even vaguely connected to the government, either by marriage or thinly shared interests, already having been made a sleeping partner or director of some ghastly thingamabob, if you can believe the journalists.
Perhaps we could even import some men, just to make sure women don’t turn the industry into a monopoly. We all know how bad monopolies are, Mr Patel, don’t we! I suggest we import a couple of male Haitians, since most of them are unemployed, and presumably quite well-endowed to compensate for the other limbs they lost in that dreadful earthquake …
Having nationalised the sex industry, thus making sure there’s enough of that to go around for everyone regardless of race, creed, gender or orientation, Mr Patel, I suggest we then move on to even more far-reaching reforms, such as replacing affirmative action with something truly radical. Like slavery.
Come on, let’s be brutally honest with ourselves here. Affirmative action never actually had anything to do with giving jobs to previously disadvantaged people, did it? It was all about revenge. I mean, who in their right minds would say “last time I made myself a cup of coffee I forgot to add two-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar, so now I’m going to make myself a cup of coffee with five teaspoons of sugar”? When you think about it, affirmative action meant nothing in practical terms; it did not guarantee better training, more efficient service delivery etc. It was simply an act of fighting racism with more racism.
So, now that we know what Africans really want from this kind of racism — exactly the same thing the old Nationalist wanted, but only in a different colour — why not go all the way, and copy, to a tee, the exact crime which the West have been guilty of in Africa since the dawn of history — slavery? They did their black slavery thing, so let’s do some white slavery!
That will be very easy. First of all, we capture the worst British soccer hooligans to visit our country during the soccer tournament, dress them up in uniforms, give them ranks and guns, and appoint them as unpaid constables in the South African police (the present constables can then automatically rise to the ranks of officers).
Britain won’t even make a big stink about it, I promise you, because they never really wanted those guys back after all!
A way of attracting an even better class of white slaves is to advertise, in the international press, top jobs and management positions in companies like, say Eskom, at lucrative salaries, and lure the best minds away from Western countries to run our infrastructures for us. Let them crack their heads about all these complicated systems and mechanisms which we have no idea how to operate ourselves! Once they arrive here, of course, we’ll force them to work without pay, while we share the spoils, and — bang! — the country is right back on track, everything is working fine, and we’re still doing nothing at all, same as before! Isn’t this a great idea, Mr Patel? I’m sure no-one else has thought of this one. This is my economic genius at work. Aren’t you in awe?
The one problem I foresee with these suggestions are that some of the more obstinate journalists, and their coconut friends such as Mondli Makhanya, not to mention all those dumb white bloggers who now hero-worship Sipho Hlongwane (even though they hated his guts right up to his previous blog entry) might actually catch on to what we’re doing and alert the international media to our plans. The only really kak thing that could happen then would be that some Western countries would hit us with sanctions. Admittedly, that might lead to a bit of runaway inflation. But don’t worry, I have a plan for that, too.
I propose that we pre-empt this worst-case scenario by changing our economic unit right away. Who needs rands and cents? Those were constructs of apartheid! Let’s devise a new monetary unit, and call it something new. Something truly African!
I have done proper research about this. I have sent anonymous questionnaires to numerous cadres and government officials, and asked them: “What single thing, in your opinion, truly symbolises the democratic revolution in South Africa? What metaphor do comrades believe in these days? What concrete object, besides the Protea, the koeksister, or the vuvuzela, truly captures the essence of our beautiful country?”
Without exception, everyone receiving the questionnaire replied: “A bottle of fine Moët champagne.”
They did not all spell it exactly the same way, but here was the proof, indeed, that this bubbly liquid grown and manufactured on French soil, and imported with the spoils of comrade kickbacks, have superseded the Firestone tyre and box of matches as true symbols of the revolution! (Eat your heart out, Winnie.)
I did some more research, and found out that, to buy a decent bottle of Moët these days, one needs to fork out at least a thousand rand.
So let’s have a new monetary unit, worth precisely one thousand rand, and call it: “The Moët”!
We can have a beautiful ten-Moët-note, with Zuma’s face and a picture of a bottle of champagne on it, and that would be our standard form of cash. Anything worth less than ten Moëts would be coins. The really small denominations of money we can count in “Moëtis” — if this sound too much like the word “muti”, don’t worry, the precedent for referring to body parts when naming coins already existed in the old days when our white ancestors had coins which they called “oortjies”.
Everything else would be easy from there, A fifty-Moët-note (with Malema’s face on it, next to a picture of a Breitling Navitimer Aopa wristwatch) can be called a “Moëlah” — because that is serious money — a hundred (with Tony Yengeni’s face superimposed over an artist’s impression of a luxury German car) we can call a “Jou-Moër” — anyone owning such a note would have reason to be truly vile and arrogant — and then, of course, the really large amount, the supreme thousand-Moët-note, worth a million rand by today’s standards — we need those big units in case of rampant inflation! — we simply cannot give any other name but “The Moëgabe” (and guess whose face would adorn it?). I like the sound of that! “The Moëgabe”. (Of course, the illustrations on this illustrious piece of paper money would include at least one luxury mansion, a pair of wacky sunglasses and an oddly patterned green sports jacket.)
This new monetary system will be elegant, it will help restore pride in our economy, and it will be fun teaching it to our kids at school. If we still have those by then (schools, kids, whatever).
Who knows, we can even get Zapiro to draw some of the pictures for us (without pay of course, this would simply be for a good cause)?
Mr Patel, I hope that you and your colleagues would give serious consideration to these well-researched, intelligent proposals.
Perhaps the ANC might even consider appointing me as minister of finance in the place of that guy with the round face whose name I can’t remember …
Author
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