Back to fronting while hunting for privileged bountry

They are reportedly armed with tranquilliser guns equipped to fire darts loaded with ketamine to bring her down and sodium thiopental to shut her up. Once the outgoing Western Cape premier has been incapacitated and relieved of her cellphone, she will be transported to an undisclosed location for reorientation.

I’m not surprised, really. The poor woman is under tremendous strain. Imagine having to move out of the sprawling Leeuwenhof estate and into a Victorian hovel in the plebeian suburb of Rosebank? If there were such a thing as white privilege, she would surely be granted the opportunity to depart the residence in a gilded chariot drawn by six Bengal tigers while the Drakensberg Boys Choir sang Hallelujah and imported fireworks set the Cape Town sky alight.

I reckon the best kind of privilege to have is the parliamentary kind. You think we peons have freedom of speech? Please. In terms of the Constitution, our lawmakers and lawbreakers “are not liable to civil or criminal proceedings, arrest, imprisonment or damages” for anything they might say in that hallowed chamber. And that extends to talking in their sleep. Come to think of it, most of the dishonourables occupying the ANC benches are exempt from criminal proceedings no matter where they are or what they do.

On Saturday night I asked neighbour Ted to come around to discuss the possibility of starting a think-tank to discuss issues of privilege. He arrived with seventeen cases of beer, claiming to have misheard me. He said he was under the impression we were building a drink-tank to be used as an emergency reservoir in the upcoming war for minority rights.

He seemed disappointed when I told him there would be no war, just a steady uptick in emigration as the mortally displeased packed up their poodles and privilege and moved to Australia where there is absolute equality in that nobody has any real rights or freedom whatsoever.

People like Ted and I can’t emigrate because the application process is too complicated and also we can never find a pen. We both work for ourselves, although Ted is marginally more self-employed than me in that he has no income at all. As always, discussions turned to the possibility of us forming a business partnership.

Since the private sector has repeatedly made it clear that it wants nothing to do with us, we would need to tap into the public sector and secure government contracts.

By 2am we had come up with a set of objectives. The first was to find an empowerment partner. The second was to find some kind of hallucinogen to help us formulate a corporate vision. Objectives 3 to 25 were illegible because they had somehow got wet and run down the page.

The beauty of our business plan lay in its simplicity. Too many companies close down because of complicated love triangles, unnecessary homicides and arguments over whose turn it is to torch the building and file the insurance claim.

For us to succeed, we would need access to black people and mind-altering substances. Find one and you find the other, said Ted. I called him an unreconstructed racist and was about to break his fibula with the sharp edge of my hand when I realised he was onto something. All we needed to do, really, was find a shebeen.

Ted eventually spotted a place that looked as if it never cared much to exercise its right to reserve admission. I wasn’t convinced it was a shebeen. I wasn’t even sure we were still in the same province.

By the time we realised we were in someone’s home, we had already helped ourselves to beers from the fridge and it would have seemed rude to leave. The place certainly wasn’t short of black people.

Ted whipped out a notebook and began taking down names. Two or three people cooperated but seemed reluctant to say if they preferred to work in human resources or finance.

I reached out and grabbed someone’s leg as he stumbled past. “Look at this one,” I said. “He’d make a damn fine chairman of the board.” The most powerful man in the company dropped what looked like an antique crack pipe and pretended to throttle me. This kind of horseplay is good for staff morale. Ted misunderstood the situation and brought him down with a straight-armed jab to the testicular department. People scattered, leaping from windows and fighting to get out. I tried to stop them.

“You won’t have to do any actual work!” I shouted. Ted thought they might have misconstrued our recruitment drive as a police raid, but that made no sense. Everyone knows there are no white cops left in South Africa.

We emptied their fridge and drove home to reflect on the very real possibility of spending our golden years in a homeless shelter. Ted started crying and I had to slap him a bit but stopped when it looked like he might be enjoying it. We agreed that we urgently needed to become beneficiaries of White Economic Empowerment (WEE), a new government policy that has not yet come up for discussion.

Unlike Black Economic Empowerment, WEE should not be broad-based. In other words, it should not apply to people who think they are white simply because they are not black. Being white is a state of mind and fierce interrogation would be necessary to determine whether a person genuinely met the criteria to qualify for WEE.

I would qualify right away because I am an Inadvertently Disadvantaged Individual (IDI). In other words, I became poor through no fault of my own. I have a list of people and animals to blame for that. By people I mean bookmakers and by animals I mean horses.

Others who would automatically benefit from WEE would be men who have been financially destroyed by divorce lawyers acting on behalf of their succubus clients, as well as Caucasian career criminals who have been squeezed out of a market saturated with affirmative action appointees.

Women would be excluded from the policy because when a white man falls on hard times he can’t slip on a skimpy skirt and wander down to the corner to generate a little easy tax-free cash. No free lunch for those who sit on their assets.

Speaking of which, the planet emitted a tiny sigh of relief on Monday at the news that Nomvula Mokonyane is no longer environment minister. But I have to say that if the ANC can appoint her as their parliamentary chair of chairs, whatever the hell that means, they can damn well promulgate the White Economic Empowerment Act. Give me a shot at that trough and I promise to find Helen Zille and bring her in alive. Or whatever.

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