Thabo and Manto will share an apartment in Hell

Erstwhile President Thabo Mbeki and his (thank you God! equally erstwhile) Minister of National Health, Manto Beetroot'n Garlic Tshabalala-Msimang will long be remembered for their genocide of tens of thousands of South Africans. How? Why?

His incomprehensible self-serving sophistry on HIV and AIDS. Hers ditto. His dithering with 'quiet diplomacy' whilst he helped keep his Stalinesque buddy Robert Mugabe in power for umpteen years - therefore making himself the surrogate executioner of thousands of Zimbabweans.

He protected Manto too - through thick and thin. After all, they fled the country via Tanzania and cadre loyalty swamps rationality under all circumstances. Innumerable examples validate this.

Her legacy is public hospitals that are ill-equipped and unable in many cases to provide even rudimentary care because she's single handedly forced nurses and pharmacists into working elsewhere in the world, in order to survive financially. But total dolt that she is, she recently and gloatingly signed 'an accord' (heaven help us) on live TV in Burundi to allow Burundian citizens 'who can't get adequate care in their own hospitals' to come overload ours even further. Showing, she bridled disingenuously, 'that Africans can find solutions to their own problems...'

Maybe if she hadn't got her wrecked liver replaced in the Folateng unit of about-to-be-unpronouncably-renamed Johannesburg hospital, but had to queue for up to 8 hours to get a pill, like thousands of indigent pensioners, she might think and behave differently. If ever a transplant was wasted - it was this one. Letting her die would have been a favour to the nation. It would have speeded up ARV treatment. It would have brought better care to babies and mothers. Medical schemes would not have wasted countless hours, vast sums of money and intellectual resources in combating her demented policies. Pharmaceutical companies would not be seriously considering abandoning South Africa and replacing themselves with agencies to distribute their meds in this country. My favourite pharmacist would still have his one person business and might not have been driven into taking a placement in Oregon, USA.

And so to the report below. We think we're a civilised democracy? I think not. We're just another African basket-case with an ever-thinning veneer of money-driven chutzpah and momentum. But we are not good, moral, compassionate people. We deserve the incompetents who largely populate our government. Viva Barbara Hogan, Viva!

 

Comments

[Louis Deenik]

Clive, you do well to bring our attention to the fact that there are people in high office that carried far too much baggage from the apartheid era into their political lives. Any person who could stand aside and allow what happened in Zim and to Aids patients in SA should in my opinion land up in the Hague. I applaud the new President's move. I pray it is a sign of good things to come. God Bless Africa.

[Jacques de Villiers]

Hi Clive,

It seems that Thabo Mbeki slipped the noose for now. My sources tell me that there was a (class action) movement to bring Mbeki to court for genocide regarding his denialist attitude towards HIV AIDS. How true it is, I don't know. But, it would certainly be an interesting turn up for the books.