SCRUTATOR
ISN’T it amazing how people love things for mahala?
By now Scrutator is sure everyone knows the opposition has called for an indefinite mass stayaway starting on Monday.
But isn’t it shocking that it has nothing to do with building sewerage systems or ensuring everyone has access to clean drinking water?
Nor has it anything to do with lessening the levels of poverty and combating HIV and Aids in the country?
It’s all about manna from heaven!
Can you imagine that those grown-ups are fighting for free seats under a proportional representation system?
I mean those seats that have nothing to do with merit or support from the electorate.
You don’t have to do anything really to get them.
Plainly speaking, those seats are meant to console losers, including those who would have been rejected by the people.
In other words, it’s a sanitised method of sneaking into parliament through the backdoor.
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The parliament jamboree did not have a place for blatant gatecrashers so someone came up with the idea of PR seats.
But this time the invitation cards were sent to wrong addresses.
And these are the cards that we are told will bring this country to a standstill.
What junk is this?
By the way, Scrutator is aware of the academic hogwash about the motive of the scheme.
The PR system must be thrown out. It must be killed.
It is too short a shortcut into political office.
It promotes indolence among political parties.
People must just work hard to gain political office.
The reason political parties are always fighting over frivolous issues is because they have so much energy left after elections because they never really have to struggle to be elected.
They know that if we deny them our votes for the proper seats they can still wait for the PR manna.
Yet something tells me that this is not about seats or the eagerness to serve the people.
It is about the benefits that come with the seat.
Remember these are people who are paid more than M15 000 a month for warming those seats in parliament.
To that huge amount add a M500 000 tax-free loan from the government and lots of other benefits.
No wonder why MPs sleep during sessions — they are overfed!
Imagine the chaos that will ensue in the assembly if the government was to immediately reduce the salary of an MP from M15 000 to M300, the same amount that Scrutator’s granny in Qacha’s Nek gets under the state pension scheme.
They will leave the house pronto to find proper jobs.
Lest I be accused of being negative, I wish to heartily congratulate the team at that weekly across town that fronts itself as the most informative newspaper for a sterling job over the past few months.
If it is true that they have a new broom then that broom is sweeping really clean.
The stories are now free of those embarrassing gaffes that we were subjected to week in, week out.
The layout is refreshingly fresh.
The captions give evidence that someone is really checking them and ensuring they are not silly.
The English has also generally improved.
Congrats guys for a job well done.
So you see, Scrutator is not just about bashing other newspapers.
I give credit where it is due.
To borrow the paper’s peculiar slogan, if no one says it, Scrutator will do.
That includes reminding whoever is cleaning copy at that paper these days to look at all the stories before publication.
Even those stories about blankets — don’t spare them!
What is it with wannabes who exalt foolhardiness as if it were a virtue?
There he was at it again, the young musician whose life we’ve been told is about to be turned into a movie, snobbishly talking about his not-so-admirable background.
Probably one of the highlights to expect in the movie, should it see the light of day, Dread proudly revealed how he was expelled from school.
“I was expelled from Lesotho High School because I was a menace. It seems I was involved — one way or another — in every scandal happening at the school so the headmaster would just approach me and say I should reveal who else was involved,” he said in an interview with the Informative.
What worries Scrutator is how the boy hardly exhibits any regret about his childhood behaviour.
He was even chuckling as he made the revelation, according to the paper.
This comes at a time the boy is on the brink of being chucked out of that musical group for allegedly drinking as if there is no tomorrow and behaving like, in his own words, a menace.
Well, maybe his life should be turned into a movie after all.
I don’t think the scriptwriter will have to wait long for an interesting twist that will give some oomph to what would be otherwise an uninspiring biopic.
If he’s just a little patient he will include the bit about how one promising musician trashed a promising career.
Why should Scrutator worry about how anyone chooses to live their lives?
Because we have children with impressionable minds who naturally aspire to follow in the footsteps of our so-called celebrities.
So the biopic, I’ve since figured out, will be a good reference when we tell our children how not to behave.
Or how to kill a music career before it even starts.
The political dinosaur called Robert Mugabe is refusing to throw in the towel.
Mugabe’s Zanu PF party is engaged in a massive political engineering project that will see it re-elect the octogenarian Mugabe as party leader at its December congress.
Party functionaries are falling head over heels to sing praises to Mugabe with some officials, whom I suspect are mentally deranged, last week giving Mugabe the new title of “Supreme Leader”.
What “supremacy” is it when you preside over the collapse of your own country?
The leader and his supporters have all gone nuts.
Doesn’t that remind us of North Korea where the Dear Leader mentality has contributed to that country’s dire economic straits leaving the impoverished state requiring food handouts from the West?
He has spent the country’s money battling to build nuclear weapons when the country is starving.
Mugabe used to literally raid the central bank just to please his shopping addict of a wife.