The health of the nation

Once again please hit a pause of the last song on the post Why Reggae is Great. Shookran.

This post might be a bit serious for some peoples liking...but it is a serious topic.

So America’s first lady: Michelle Obama is in town and she paid a courtesy visit to South Africa’s honorary first citizen Nelson Mandela.

F##K JZ…. As long as he is alive Mandela will always be more important then any President we elect. Key word in that sentence is as long as he is alive.

How long has he got left anyway? At 93…the man has had a good innings.

After her trip to Mandela, Obama said that he is in good health. But this announcement comes a week after the death of Albertina Sisulu and scant hours after the death of Kader Asmal, both struggle veterans.

Could it be that higher powers are telling Obama what to say so that the country does not hit panic stations and journalists start pitching tents outside Madiba’s home on ‘death watch’? We must remember that the man was in hospital last year for treatment relating to a respiratory tract infection.

One would hate to think that this is the case, but being in a situation where this has happened before….don’t count it out.

As is widely publicised on the Lions Den, I lived in Dubai UAE for two years between from beginning 2005 to the early 2007. I was at a press conference for the 2006 Dubai Marathon at the JW Marriot when it was announced that the Sheikh of the Dubai Emirate (what you would call a Province or a State of the UAE) Sheikh Maktoum died suddenly.

Two weeks of national mourning was declared all the Night Club Establishments and Dance Halls were closed and the radio stations (including the one yours truly worked for) played recordings of the Qur’an [as is tradition when a member of state dies].

Only after the period of morning and the burial did it transpire that Sheikh Maktoum was actually quite ill before he passed on. This was not released to the public at the time of his death or leading up to his death in fear that it would in fact cause national panic.

So it is quite possible that the same will happen with Madiba. Or they will be open and honest about his illness and hope that the country respects the mans legacy enough to not go into a complete state of anarchy.

Guaranteed there will be whole scale panic from the white population.

Madiba must be one of the very few Black leaders who has won the hearts of every white person in the country. Even the generation of Apartheid extremists who were still around when he was elected President in 1994.

Living next door to us at the time was a family relative from my Grandfathers side who was one of Eugene Terrebalnche’s body guards back when the AWB were holding rallies one or twice a month. When it came to the 1994 elections he (like many other white South Africans) believed that there was going to be a civil war and that the ANC would convince the Black people of the country to go on a witch hunt to ‘necklace’ all the whites. So he stocked up on tined beef, backed beans, tined sweet corn, and candles.

The elections came and went peacefully and he was forced to eat his words about the black people. But then he said that the civil war will come when Mandela dies.

There is a stronger case for this then many would care to admit. When Mandela took power he established a party based on sound moral values, which were embraced by leaders such as Thabo Mbeki and Cyril Ramaphosa. However, the leadership of the ANC has deteriorated so much that leaders such as Julius Malema tell the crowd that they must vote for the ANC or Mandela will die!

While Mandela is alive his presence can keep these imbeciles in check and keep them on the moral straight and narrow. With him gone there will no one to keep these miscreants on a proverbial ‘leash’ and who knows what they might do.