What the hell is happening on our roads?
There is total havoc as construction workers dig up the road, fill it up with gravel, dig again and fill up with more gravel.
That cycle is being repeated across town, as my lawyer friends say, ad infinitum.
Lawyers have this nauseating habit of throwing in Latin terms to give some semblance of sophistication.
The idea, I suppose, is to shock friends into submission and expose their ignorance.
Now back to the roads story.
The light rain that fell this week saw the shoddy work of filling in pot-holes with dirt being exposed again.
I am dead sure that next week the workers will be back on the streets to begin the process all over.
Can’t we, for once, do a decent job on our roads?
Until these guys learn that engineering is not like a car wash business where you just connect a hose pipe and everything else goes into place, we will not get anywhere on this matter.
But I am having serious doubts that the work is being done by proper engineers who went to a proper engineering school.
The quality of work simply leaves a lot to be desired.
Scrutator has never understood the shallow discourse peddled by our opposition politicians.
They are a quarrelsome lot who never seem to see eye-to-eye with government ministers even when they talk sense.
We have now grown used to seeing and hearing them peddling complete falsehoods and half-truths.
Their so-called political think-tanks are alarmingly shallow, spewing half-baked lies couched as political analysis.
It takes a bit of courage for a politician to admit his mistake, doesn’t it?
But how many have that courage?
Now take this proposal from Lesotho People’s Congress leader Kelebone Maope, one whom I thought had some of the sharpest legal brains in the land.
Maope’s LPC wants MPs to earn the same money as government ministers. For what?
Does he want these MPs to be rewarded for sleeping during debate in parliament?
Besides, some of these MPs have never said anything sensible in parliament.
I doubt if they have any grey matter between their ears.
Maope must resist the urge to take a populist stance on critical issues that affect the nation.
“The number of rulers is too large and they are lucratively paid when compared to other sectors of society,” Maope said.
“We need to think how we can reduce this huge number of bureaucrats so that lots of money channelled to their salaries could be redirected for the development of the people.”
Good point.
But this is what we call grandstanding.
Take the analogy of a newsroom.
Why should an editor earn the same salary as a reporter?
Why should a medical doctor earn the same salary as a nurse?
And why on earth should a government minister, a proud holder of a PhD (not Permanent Home Defender), earn the same money like a Micky Mouse MP who only made it into parliament because he could speak better than his rival in the ABC?
Such populism should never find space in our national discourse.
Maope’s argument is fundamentally flawed.
In fact whoever raises such an argument has no locus standi, as my learned friends in the legal fraternity say.
Scrutator thinks Ntate Maope’s argument is one that is purely driven by expediency.
Case closed.
Still on matters legal, Scrutator now fully agrees with the adage that the law is indeed an ass.
A Quthing woman is in trouble with the law after she strangled a would-be rapist who had stormed her house.
I think the woman is a heroine.
She acted heroically.
We have too many men who think they can whet their violent sexual appetites by snatching things that are not theirs.
He is a thief of women, as our newspapers here would say.
Men should learn the art of negotiation, the art of telling someone to go to hell but at the same time making him look forward to the journey.
However, I am convinced that there should be one simple solution to this problem: castration.
Once we start castrating these imbeciles we would go a long way in dealing with this national pandemic, once and for all.
Women have endured too much for too long.
I also want to salute the 65-year-old nkhono who head-butted a 26-year-old shameless man who had attempted to rape her.
Nkhono Mokiba told the Maseru Magistrate’s Court this week that the man stormed her house, strangled her and demanded sex.
These men have no shame indeed – a woman old enough to be your grandmother!
Nkhono fought back pushing the rapist to the floor.
But she was not done yet.
She then head-butted her attacker, sending him back to the floor with a thud.
Send them to the cleaners, bo-’m`e.
