ON THE WATER: Be pure. Be vigilant. Behave. Or else
BEHAVE was what Deputy Mineral Resources Minister Godfrey Oliphant told critics of President Jacob Zuma in the business community, according to a report by Business Day’s Allan Seccombe on the Zuma trash-fest at the Johannesburg Mining Indaba last week.
Nothing vague about that. The instruction to behave is given in the imperative mood. It is a command. It is issued with the confidence of a man who does not see the need to add "or else" to his utterance. Business leaders, such as AngloGold Ashanti chairman Sipho Pityana, have been told the government is running out of patience and will soon hit back.
A clear threat then. Now the business community has to work out what it is that will be doing the hitting. It might be a big stick, or perhaps someone will be getting a text message that says the jig is up.
We do know it will be bad though.
The threat comes from an official in a government that has at its disposal the full might of the state, sanctioned as it is by a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence. Still, business cannot be faulted for wanting to know exactly what Oliphant means.
Would he, on a day when enough was enough, order the riot cops to barge in between the chains and begin breaking pin-striped heads?
Will there be arrests in the dead of the night, accompanied by mysterious falls from the Special Branch’s office windows and spectacular rises in the value of rand-hedge stocks?
Anything can happen. Truly. Take the word behave. It is possible that Oliphant remembered it from his reading of Torquemada, a sci-fi cartoon serial featured in the monthly 2000 AD during the uncomplicated 1980s. The main character, a xenophobe called Torquemada, likes to admonish the Converso (read, unreconstructed colonialist) to "Be pure. Be vigilant. Behave."
Torquemada’s character is sympathetically based on his 15th-century namesake, Tomás de Torquemada, who ran the Spanish Inquisition (call it the Special Branch of the late 1400s) on behalf of the pope for a while. He diligently applied the Alhambra Decree that would homogenise Spanish culture as Catholic by expelling practicing Jews from the Iberian Peninsula.
Spain, in the meantime, moved on. In 1968, it repealed the Alhambra Decree and did what it could to undo the damage done by the order to behave or else. The New York Times reports that, for close on a year, Spain has operated without an elected government and that the Spaniards like it. It quotes Félix Pastor, a teacher, who expresses the general sentiment about official corruption, arrogance and disdain for the country’s citizens as "no government, no thieves".
Now there’s is an idea. It might occur to Oliphant that the criticism of Zuma he finds so offensive is the genuine desire to rid the country of its thieves by getting rid of the government. Surely, even for someone as obtuse as a dyed-in-the-wool member of the innately corrupt ANC, it must be clear that it is better to have no government at all than an oligarchy of lickspittles to "the sponsor-in-chief of corruption", as Pityana so eloquently puts it.
Then again, perhaps Oliphant is so deluded that it doesn’t occur to him that he and his party do not have the final word on doing the right thing for the country. But he should know this: we will not be told to behave by an official of a government and a member of a party that epitomises bad behaviour.
Mr Oliphant, you should know that no matter what your "or else" might mean, or how committed you are to your shoddy attempt at intimidation, we the people will not stop telling you how to behave.
• Blom is a fly-fisherman who likes to write
President Jacob Zuma. Picture: REUTERS/SIPHIWE SIBEKO
BEHAVE was what Deputy Mineral Resources Minister Godfrey Oliphant told critics of President Jacob Zuma in the business community, according to a report by Business Day’s Allan Seccombe on the Zuma trash-fest at the Johannesburg Mining Indaba last week.
Nothing vague about that. The instruction to behave is given in the imperative mood. It is a command. It is issued with the confidence of a man who does not see the need to add "or else" to his utterance. Business leaders, such as AngloGold Ashanti chairman Sipho Pityana, have been told the government is running out of patience and will soon hit back.
A clear threat then. Now the business community has to work out what it is that will be doing the hitting. It might be a big stick, or perhaps someone will be getting a text message that says the jig is up.
We do know it will be bad though.
The threat comes from an official in a government that has at its disposal the full might of the state, sanctioned as it is by a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence. Still, business cannot be faulted for wanting to know exactly what Oliphant means.
Would he, on a day when enough was enough, order the riot cops to barge in between the chains and begin breaking pin-striped heads?
Will there be arrests in the dead of the night, accompanied by mysterious falls from the Special Branch’s office windows and spectacular rises in the value of rand-hedge stocks?
Anything can happen. Truly. Take the word behave. It is possible that Oliphant remembered it from his reading of Torquemada, a sci-fi cartoon serial featured in the monthly 2000 AD during the uncomplicated 1980s. The main character, a xenophobe called Torquemada, likes to admonish the Converso (read, unreconstructed colonialist) to "Be pure. Be vigilant. Behave."
Torquemada’s character is sympathetically based on his 15th-century namesake, Tomás de Torquemada, who ran the Spanish Inquisition (call it the Special Branch of the late 1400s) on behalf of the pope for a while. He diligently applied the Alhambra Decree that would homogenise Spanish culture as Catholic by expelling practicing Jews from the Iberian Peninsula.
Spain, in the meantime, moved on. In 1968, it repealed the Alhambra Decree and did what it could to undo the damage done by the order to behave or else. The New York Times reports that, for close on a year, Spain has operated without an elected government and that the Spaniards like it. It quotes Félix Pastor, a teacher, who expresses the general sentiment about official corruption, arrogance and disdain for the country’s citizens as "no government, no thieves".
Now there’s is an idea. It might occur to Oliphant that the criticism of Zuma he finds so offensive is the genuine desire to rid the country of its thieves by getting rid of the government. Surely, even for someone as obtuse as a dyed-in-the-wool member of the innately corrupt ANC, it must be clear that it is better to have no government at all than an oligarchy of lickspittles to "the sponsor-in-chief of corruption", as Pityana so eloquently puts it.
Then again, perhaps Oliphant is so deluded that it doesn’t occur to him that he and his party do not have the final word on doing the right thing for the country. But he should know this: we will not be told to behave by an official of a government and a member of a party that epitomises bad behaviour.
Mr Oliphant, you should know that no matter what your "or else" might mean, or how committed you are to your shoddy attempt at intimidation, we the people will not stop telling you how to behave.
• Blom is a fly-fisherman who likes to write
