It is still not clear whether the department of sports, arts, and culture intends to spend R22 million on a 100m-tall national flag, or whether it wants a massive flag to fly from a 100m-tall flagpole.
Whatever the truth is, the plan is, even by the ANC’s “let them eat cake” detachment from reality, simply absurd.
Not because it is not technically feasible – a flagpole that tall would be tricky to build and keep stable, although a giant flag placed at ground level would be easier – but because the waste of this amount of money in our current circumstances is mind-boggling.
Totally unable to read the room, the department believes the massive flag will become a tourist attraction and will help to unite the country.
Judging by the reaction so far to the hare-brained scheme, all the proposal has done is unite people in their anger at the ANC’s continued squandering of our steadily declining financial resources.
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No surprise, either, that many of the negative comments centre around the probability that this is another project where the comrades can gather at the taxpayer-funded feeding trough.
Surely, President Cyril Ramaphosa, you are not going to let these tone-deaf apparatchiks get away with it?
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