I bought a Kreepy Krauly for the firepool

I used to enjoy paying tax. Really, I did. It started when I realised that I wasn’t rich enough to avoid paying tax and that I therefore had two options. My first was to get angry. I could seethe at having to hand over a large chunk of my earnings to a state that veers

We demand better lies!

Do you know what’s really gone to hell in the new South Africa? The quality of the lies we get told by our government. Yes sir, the lies were way better in the old days I grew up listening to the fictions of the Nats and, by God, those hillbillies had the gift of the

A watchlist

On the weekend the Sunday Independent ran a story “in the spirit of transparency and proper record-keeping” that featured a long list of names. Each name belonged to a Member of Parliament. They had two things in common: they were members of the ANC, and they had voted Yes to adopt the report that absolved

Please don’t touch the goat

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the official Nkandla tour! Where we prove that you have nowhere left to hide and we have nothing to fear … Er, wait, let me just put on my reading glasses … Oh. Right. Where we prove we have nothing to hide and you have nothing to

Help yourself, Jacob

Heh heh heh. An ugly sound echoing through the silence of our collective shock. A humourless, dusty wheeze, the kind you expect from a cartoon baddie whose villainy has desiccated him. It seems a cruel sound, a pure expression of power mocking the powerless. It’s tempting to project all kinds of evil onto that sound;

Another shot of outrage, anyone?

The joke goes something like this. A guy walks into a bar and orders a drink. The barkeep pours it, and the guy picks up the glass — and then splashes the booze all over his face. “Geez, buddy,” says the surprised barkeep, “why‘d you do that?” The man, genuinely perplexed, says, “I wish I

Still suckers after all these years

It was fitting that the speeches on Freedom Day were delivered by our leaders. The day is a political memorial, remembering a profound political event, and we … Ugh. Sorry. I can’t. Politicians? Talking about freedom? That’s basically like chickens celebrating Safety Day and inviting a family of foxes to do the speeches. And yet,

The Thunder That Thunders

So I wrote a fake history book in 2013, all except the last chapter. That was provided by the government, after a spokesdrone slipped R5 into their new Historo-Matic machine. This is what came out of the Truth Slot. * Hello South Africa, how are you, we are fine, thank you for asking. This is

The fault is in our stars

A misunderstanding was inevitable. The French delegation spoke very little English. The South African politicians who sat across the table spoke a little French but were just at that moment pressing lobster thermidor into their mouths and so their words were muffled. What they did manage to say, however, was that the were offering the

Hello darkness, my old friend

Apparently something had cracked. Or someone was on crack. Either way, the word “crack” was featuring heavily in explanations for why the country had been plunged into darkness at the weekend. It didn’t really matter, though. Nobody was listening to the explanations. We used to, once. We would read official statements and google the bits