IT was a weekend of celebration across the country.
At least 2 200 graduates were capped at a colourful graduation ceremony at our glorified high school in Roma last weekend.
I wish to congratulate those who made it and welcome them into the real world.
But Scrutator has no sympathy for those thick, dumb 100 students who failed to graduate after they were caught cheating during exams.
They got their comeuppance!
Why someone would choose to booze the whole year only to seek to smuggle written notes into the exam room boggles my mind.
But they are a brave lot, those fools.
I hear most of them were challenging the authorities in court after they were caught cheating!
Even if they get a brilliant lawyer from the moon I bet their case will come crumbling down like a deck of cards.
Next time they should remember that books, fornication and booze do not mix.
Mixing business with pleasure is only a preserve of those who have made it in life and not the greenhorns who are still in school.
It is not like I always go out to look for the negative at the university.
I just stumble into the negative as soon as I walk through that gate.
I struggle to look for the positive and I always find none.
If it is not about the fornication it is about the student protests over money.
Now their cousins at the other higher school that pretends to be a university have caught up.
But at least their grievances appear quite genuine.
Surely one can see through that charade of a university and see that they are taking those innocent kids for a ride.
It is said if you randomly throw a stone at a proper university you hit a potential professor.
But if you do at any of our glorified high schools you are likely to hit an idiot!
Do Marxist revolutionaries buy lipstick?
If their wives are much younger they do, apparently.
You see Scrutator was surprised to read this week of how “revolutionary” Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was spotted in a down-market drug store in New York.
He was on an official visit to the city to address the UN last week.
The 86-year-old Mugabe’s wife Grace, 41 years his junior, is well-known for her taste for high fashion. Not so much Marxist -Leninist ideology.
This explains why the Dear Leader was spotted in such an unlikely place at such an unlikely age.
Scrutator thinks the old man would be better off helping his wife with her homework.
Grace reportedly dropped out of a university course where she was studying for a Bachelor of Arts (English) degree after dismally failing most of her examinations last year.
This is quite ironic because Mugabe himself is renowned for his mastery of the Queen’s language.
It is quite painful to see how the man who Africa looked to as its shining example of leadership has been reduced to a pariah who shops for lipstick in downtown New York at the slightest chance thanks to international travel sanctions.
Imagine how much time he would have for shopping freely if only he had retired gracefully — no pun intended.
Scrutator is embarrassed by the shambolic run-up to the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi that has dashed India’s hopes of showcasing itself as a dynamic emerging superpower and delivering an event that would rival the spectacular Beijing Olympics.
The country’s old image of inefficient bureaucracy, poor infrastructure, graft and squalor has been broadcast around the world because of the international sporting event, tagged India’s “Shame Games” by the media.
Obviously the Commonwealth turmoil has been a blow to the vision the country hoped to project of a modern shining India that could deliver complex projects on time and within budget
The bad news reached a crescendo last week when a footbridge to the Games’ centrepiece stadium collapsed and the Games governing body branded the athletes’ village “filthy” and “uninhabitable”.
India, which won the bid to host the Games in 2003 but only started working on them at the beginning of 2008, has no excuse for the last-minute rush.
The biggest mystery however is the amount of time it took for the government to step in to try to rescue the event.
While the problems had been building for months, it has only been in the last few weeks that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been holding crisis meetings to jumpstart preparations for the Games.
The Commonwealth Games Organising Committee called the woes embroiling the Games a “collective failure”.
But it is relieving that this debacle did not have to happen on African soil.
Imagine if bridges had collapsed in Johannesburg or Durban during the Fifa 2010 World Cup.
Imagine if the world football governing body had ruled that South Africa’s hotels were filthy and unihabitable.
The excitable global media would have descended on the poor continent like a holocaust.
Which gives me reason to congratulate President Jacob Zuma’s government for a job well-done — for confounding the critics of our beloved continent.
India’s large-scale business and investments will certainly be impacted by this colossal display of ineptitude.
This is a clearly a public spectacle of a large project gone wrong.
The Games should have given India a chance of showcasing its rising economy, recent infrastructure development, and improved business environment.
But now confidence in India’s infrastructure, its capacity to organise large events and its reputation as a tourist destination have all been brought into question.
Maybe Prime Minister Singh should have copied a few notes from Africa, from President Zuma.
