Rian Malan tells it as it is ... couldn't have done better in a month of Sundays update

The following piece by Rian Malan was sent to me by email and since it encapsulates many of my personal views so much better than I could say it I decided to post it here. I'm sure Rian won't mind ... if he does ... let him sue me.

It's a sunny weekday afternoon in Jo'burg, and I am lunching with friends at an outdoor restaurant. The joint we're in was hit by armed robbers earlier this week.

The newspapers on the table are full of hair-raising tribulations – our former police chief on trial for bribery, commuter buses shot up by murderous taxi bosses who won't tolerate competition, and elders of the African National Congress declining to sign the charge sheet against Julius Malema, the controversial youth leader who made global headlines the other day by endorsing Robert Mugabe, the cocky little psychopath who ruined neighbouring Zimbabwe.

Malema is now facing disciplinary charges, but no one in the ruling party is willing to take the risk of being identified as his accuser.

This is worrying. Are racist demagogues winning the battle for control of the ANC? Are decent black men scared to take a stand lest they find themselves alongside whites, trussed up in the missionary cooking pot while Malema lights a fire beneath us?

In a normal society, such questions would induce nervous breakdown, but my mates and I are laughing.

We're sitting in the African sun, sharing jokes, and wondering how to con foreigners into coming here for the World Cup.

Once upon a time, South Africans imagined that this soccer extravaganza would make us all rich.

Myself, I struggled to believe that half a million football tourists would cross the planet in the midst of a brutal recession to visit a country best known for its high crime rate.

My neighbours scoffed, preferring to believe they would make a killing by renting out their homes. Alas. Bookings are running at about half the anticipated level.

Would-be scalpers are stuck with tickets they can't even give away, and Fifa's gluttonous marketing arm has reportedly managed to lease only 1% of the luxury private boxes in our enormously expensive new stadia.

I am rather enjoying the resulting cries of pain. Fifa has made a monkey out of South Africa , encouraging us to spend billions we don't have on football stadiums we don't need in the absurd belief that we could recoup our losses by gouging football tourists whose willingness to come here was always in doubt.

Our own leaders collaborated enthusiastically, partly because they relished the glory of presiding over an event of World Cup stature, but also because they were eager to participate in murky backroom deals that saw politically connected individuals reaping obscene profits on taxpayer-funded construction contracts.

Now we're all saddled by debts it will take generations to pay off. I'm so riled that part of me would be gratified if the World Cup were a complete failure.

But South Africa is a complicated country, and there's always another side of the story. As I write, a certain Mrs Gladys Dladla is ironing clothes in my kitchen.

Gladys is an old-school Zulu matriarch, struggling heroically to maintain a huge family on her meagre earnings as my once-a-week char. She lacks the wherewithal to bribe officials who control access to state housing, so she's lived in a tin shack for 16 years.

In recent weeks, getting to work has become a frightening ordeal thanks to renewed tensions between police and the aforementioned taxi thugs.

Gladys's life seems entirely miserable, but she always shows up on time, chattering cheerfully about church and her hope that God and the ancestral spirits will soon guide us to victory in the national lottery. Gladys and I have a little syndicate going.

The World Cup is an event of huge symbolic importance to Mrs Dladla. In the next several weeks, oily ANC politicians will attempt to convince you that this tournament is a tribute to their heroic victory over apartheid and associated triumphs of the human spirit.

Hm. For people like Gladys, the longing for success is actually rooted in despair. They're so tired of being losers and also-rans, trapped at the bottom of a society that constantly threatens to degenerate into just another African basket case.

Their dream was that in June 2010 the world's eyes would descend on us, and at last find something to admire. Mrs Dladla looks on these things with enormous pride.

She feels that their glory reflects on her directly, and besides, there's always the hope that football tourism might generate jobs for her unemployed offspring.

She was a great supporter of short-lived plans to turn my rambling old home into a cheap doss house for football hooligans. In the end, I baulked at paying tribute to Fifa, whose lawyers crushed all attempts to market World Cup lodgings through any channels other than their own.

Just as well, because our doss house would most likely have failed anyway.


So now we stand before you with clean hands. We have nothing to gain from the World Cup but the pleasure of your company, so it would be nice if you changed your minds about coming. Please! We've almost bankrupted ourselves in our determination to stage a tournament that runs like clockwork.

And if it doesn't – you can have a chuckle at our expense. Last week's newspapers reported a state of abject unreadiness among the pom-pom girls scheduled to perform at the opening ceremony.

A day or two later, President Jacob Zuma informed America that we have the laziest and most useless civil service on the planet.

Elsewhere such an admission would have precipitated the government's downfall. Here, the story was relegated to page five.

I struggle to see how anyone can resist a country where such things happen. South Africa is amazing! At any given moment, all possible futures seem entirely plausible. We are winning, we are losing. We are progressing even as we hurtle backwards.

Every day brings momentous exhilarations and dumbfounding setbacks, and the sun shines brightly even in winter. Throw in the heady proximity of Mandela and Beckham, and you're almost guaranteed a splendid time.

As for crime, well, yes, crime is a threat, but our police have been given orders to smash anyone who so much as touches a hair on any football fan's head.

If you book now, you'll arrive just in time to catch a last glimpse of our fading rainbow, and the first stirrings of our next upheaval.If that sounds alarming, I wouldn't worry. There is much to be said for living on the edge, in a place shot through with "heartspace and the danger of beauty", as the Boer poet Breytenbach once phrased it.

Britain seems pallid in comparison. We are told that your election was an event of epochal significance, but from Jo'burg, it looked boring – three nice white men with almost identical opinions jostling for space on the same centrist pinhead. As for the prospect of a hung parliament… you call that a crisis? Good God. We have far worse, every day, before breakfast. And we're still laughing. Better get here before we stop.

FLAG UPDATE: Charles Moore and Kieran counted 128 flags this morning. My efforts are being rewarded.

My day off becomes an off day...

Having worked like titans this past week we get the programme to bed early and give ourselves a long weekend.

I am happy for the opportunity to pay a bit more attention to my blog and my Scrabble games ...

I switch on the radio and hear the news ... Frederick van Zyl-Slabbert has died. Now this guy was one of my heroes.

His role in breaking the political stalemate in the '80s and averting full-scale civil war in South Africa is much underestimated. He could always be counted upon to bring a measure of sanity to the most explosive situations.

He was one of those South Africans and Afrikaners who made me proud to be one ... a South African and an Afrikaner.

With this bit of sad news to get me going I find myself stuck in the starting blocks ... I turn to Scrabble for solace and to get my mind working ... a strategy that worked well when I was unemployed.

I play all my games and even get two 7-letter words but I get no ideas.

After pottering about in my cottage for a while I decide to come to Nuno's ... have a beer and read the newspapers for inspiration.

No luck.

As per usual they only serve to depress me ... "The face of the Rolex gang terror", says The Star

This gang apparently follow people who buy expensive watches and jewelery home and rob them. This one guy was caught on CCTV .... and he looks the part of a bad-ass gangster. I hope that now that his face is known he would be caught.

The Afrikaans daily Beeld tries to milk the last bit of emotional sop out of the Airbus crash in Libya ... "My dad's plane crashed" is their headline.

The rest is mostly crime, corruption and Julius Malema stories.

All depressing.

The ANC had the opportunity to get rid of that young Hitler in the making, Malema, and instead chose just to give him a slap on the wrist and demand that he apologises for his insanity.

Very depressing indeed.

No wonder newspaper sales are plummeting ... their regular readers must be committing suicide in droves.

That was how my day off became an off day. As you can see I still have nothing to say.

The Baboon Scale

In the late 70s or early 80s PJ O'Rourke visited South Africa as part of his series Holidays in Hell. He listed all the problems facing apartheid South Africa and asked rhetorically what South Africans did in the face of such seemingly insurmountable obstacles. His answer: "They drink."

South Africa today faces equally daunting prospects.

Unemployment runs at anything between 24% or 45%. That is depending on whom you ask. The official rate is 24.3% but nobody really believes that number. In my own view it is closer to 35%.

Education is in a shambles after a disastrous dalliance with so-called Outcomes Based Education.

Skills levels amongst most of the unemployed are basically non-existent, meaning that they are unemployable.

After a vigorous drive to 'transform' the public service through affirmative action most of the middle management of the service are often found incapable of writing an actionable letter. This means that service delivery often grinds to a mushy halt exactly where policy is supposed to take effective shape.

Crime and corruption is rampant if not actually out of control.

Infrastructure is decaying faster than it can be fixed.

Julius Malema, HIV/Aids and other diseases.

That is to mention only a few of the problems that I can think of off the top of my head on a rainy Monday morning.

So what do South Africans do in the face of all of these problems? They drink.

This is a country where the previous minister of health drank her liver to hell, skipped the waiting list and got a new one which she then proceeded to drink to pieces again.

Here anti-hangover cures are regularly advertised on national TV and hard liquor is sold in plastic satchels to make it easy to smuggle into sporting and entertainment events.

It is also a country with a scientific scale to measure hangovers: The Baboon Scale:

Level 1: A feint dullness of the senses experienced mostly by non-regular drinkers after they had one glass of wine too many the previous night. Hardened drinkers cannot even remember when last they had a level 1. Should it occur to them they are likely to call in sick.

Level 2: Non-regular drinkers think of calling in sick after having three glasses of wine too many but they still go to work where you can often find them at the coffee machine saying: "Never again". Regular drinkers feel on top of their game.

Level 3: Non-drinkers call in sick. Regular drinkers go to work thinking: "Never again" but not saying it.

Level 4: Non-drinkers go to hospital and hardened drinkers think of calling in sick. They then take their favourite anti-hangover cure and go to work where they spend a lot of time around the coffee machine saying: "Never again".

Level 5: This is the last level where one can even think of pretending to be functional. Only the most hardened drinkers would go to work and then only for half a day. All other people call in sick.

Level 6: Hardened drinkers call in sick and most other people go to hospital.

Level 7: Hardened drinkers go to hospital. Other people are still there after the previous time.

Level 8: Hardened drinkers wake up and hope they are dead. Other people wake up and they are dead.

Level 9: Hardened drinkers wake up and they are dead.

So there you are ... the Baboon Scale to measure babelas or hangovers, of which I am the proud inventor.

That brings me somehow back to Julius Malema. The problem with Julius is that he would have been funny if he was not so dangerous with his populist crap he feeds to the uneducated masses. He reminds me of a young Hitler or Mussolini. In fact he will turn a Level 2 hangover or babelas into a Level 4 or 5 if you think about him too much. This is exactly what is happening to me now. So I am logging off to go and have a lie-down.