Ongoing press reports are that the five Cuban gentlemen that were held captive for over a decade are currently visiting our shores. The brothers were sentenced for apparently spying for someone on America or something to that effect. Well, welcome to Namibia and I hope you enjoy your time here.
To my dear visitors, thank you once again for having contributed immensely to the struggle and our political emancipation. Yours truly trusts and hopes your visit with the Founding Father will invoke pleasant memories.
Piece of advice though, do not meet in the old Administrator General’s (Louis Pienaar) abode, there might still be some bugs and who knows who might still keep their ears to the ground! OOPS!! excuse the pun!!
Satire – noun means “the use of irony, ridicule, humour or exaggeration to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary or topical issues”. But I know you knew that.
My colleague, the Rambler, set the tone in his column on Friday by asking why Namibian rugby coaches, same example as their South African counterparts, opt to engage blacks and coloureds on the wings. Is it wrong to call them “white supremast assholes”!
From then on things just went downhill. Danie Vermeulen resigned and caused a breakdown of the social media systems. Facebook has not seen the last chapter written yet. Check these headlines! “Vermeulen skok soos Mannetti”, “Afrigter-sage ontbloot verskeie kwessies”, “Vermeulen het meeste hulpbronne gehad”. Nothing is lost in translation. Now come the rebuffs, counterclaims, denials and wordplay in typical counsellor fashion. Like Shakespeare once said “leave it to lawyers and litigators to create a mess that no one can understand nor untangle”!
Headlines scream “NRU sets Vermeulen straight”, “Vermeulen lists reasons for his shock resignation”, “NRU rubbishes Vermeulen’s claims” and the clincher – “Sports commission to investigate NRU”. The most worrying is the last one. Sleepy Hollow does not even understand its own mandate, let alone investigate somebody else. One doubts whether they can organise a piss-up in a brewery!
But just look at the timeline here, the NRU 4 resigned BEFORE Danie Vermeulen. The quartet was unhappy with shenanigans at Lichtenstein-Strasse committed by HE and his cronies. Short on their heels was coach Danie Vermeulen’s departure. The latter still has the temerity to blame the NRU president and the remaining board members, nogal sies!!.
Then the NRU counters with a response that the departed mentor enjoyed the best moral, material and playing personnel at his disposal! This smacks as ungratefulness! How could he! Previous national coaches had to make do with almost the same as clubs put up with!
Rumour has it that the portfolio minister was also approached to assist in sorting out the mess. NRU 4 were sent back to engage in dialogue with the other half of the non-mandated board they left behind in the first place! Are we still on the same wavelength?
It is really astonishing to notice the kind of emotions that were evoked by the resignation of Vermeulen? What is more interesting to witness, and to an extent very worrisome is the divided opinion between black and white in the aftermath of this particular debacle. Read the SMS pages, Facebook comments and even a section of the printed media and make your own assessment of the situation.
When Bucksy Mannetti resigned, the English newspapers and subsequent readers’ responses came from those sources. In Vermeulen’s case, our pale-skinned brothers of Dutch descent seem to dominate the headlines. Am I reading too much in this? Well, I don’t think so. It’s my sincere belief that a raw nerve has been touched in this regard, hence the laager mentality. All in all, I see light at the end of the tunnel, albeit a very faint one.
The media officer, whoever he/she is, should rather go and read the Constitution of the Republic of Namibia. Articles 22, 23, 24 and 25 give us freedom of speech, expression, association and a host of others, including yourself and any other person.
Start with your own board members, who have developed a nasty habit of deliberately and selectively leaking confidential information to the media, without beating about the bush, the Afrikaans media in particular.
With this in mind, I sign off and wish we can all sit around a pot of homebrew haya water of Moag somewhere in some nil-star kabashu in Eveline Street chewing the fat off these topical issues. Adieu!