Sunday, October 27, 2013

ZAPIRO

Zapiro is one quite interesting sound in South Africa.

It is for me one of the decibelthat reverberate o so soothingly and salubriously with this universe.


Zapiro keeps our relatively young democracy alive, kicking and growing.  Zapiro nurses an otherwise as-yet-quite-sickly democracy.


What or Who is Zapiro? You may be asking.  I will tell you in due time, but may I be for this brief moment allowed to dwell on our societal maladies and illnesses  as South Africans?


IN a nutshell, methinks we are a veritably much afflicted society where the syndrome is that of dog wagged by its own tail and our national cart is almost always put before the horse.


Please let me explain myself.



CIVIL SERVANTS
Ever heard about service delivery protests where state property is routinely wrecked by beserk, confused and ignorant masses of people who confuse animate objects with the inanimate? Seen some torched municipality building somewhere in your neighbourhood?

Well that would be part and parcel of the status quo in South Africa and of course elsewhere in Africa, and Somalia should come to your mind if I as blog writer and your as my reader have the same page.

These upheavals where violence is wreaked mainly against state property happens almost always where you find civil servants from the lowest to the highest lording it over the citizens that put them in employ in the first place.

The worst case scenario for such impundence by the civil servants is of course a civil war but fortunately for us South Africans that is still a far cry even where it could be worst.

Be that as it may,  how many times have you walked into some government office in our republic post-1994 and you listened to this guy or girl the other side of the counter barking down at you when you request for services for which you are supposed to be paying tax? A myriad!


How many times have you read stories of a citizen getting into trouble for maybe wagging a finger at the State President’s motorcade? A myriad! (even some minions around the president’s motorcade prefer you driving yourself to an early grave rather than staying in the road when the blue lights of so-called VIP vehicles wish to overtake you)

Now, this abnormality of ‘servant usurping master’s role’ is very rife in our post-apartheid South Africa, leaving many of us thinking that perhaps Apartheid is not dead, but has rather changed its skin colour.


THE LAWYER-CLIENT CONFIDENTIALITY RAPED BY TOO MANY SOUTH AFRICANS LAWYERS




You can find aforementioned societal malady  even amongst a fraternity that is probably the best-trained (in comparison to civil servants ) to take instructions: the veritable which shall imbibe and internalize all the tricks of the master who in this case is the client!

Problems are the apparent toadiness 'softness' of too many black lawyers in South Africa particularly when the court is constituted by a white individual judge or magistrate.  The second problem is is of course coming with the next video which seems to blame to blame at least partly to Freemasonry this apparently hamstrung nature of legal defence counsel in South Africa. 
In fairness to Freemasonry, I should...perhaps digressing too far from Zapiro...enlighten you (where as yet you might thus far have been standing unenlightened) how (at least as per one video if without blog author's deliberate act of advertising these 'Men of the Lodge') you could in South Africa join them if you so wish. (I PERSONALLY WILL NEVER JOIN THEM IF THEIR LOOKS AND SOUND ARE AS AT LEAST ONE OF THE VIDEOS THAT FOLLOWS).






The point that I was belabouring was that of the legal fraternity playing lapdog to the status quo (detour to Freemasonry/Illuminati notwithstanding).

We were in fact looking at the legal fraternity, with particular focus to counsel that defends the accused citizen.


I mean when I began to fight acts of corruption in my state department that will obviously remain nameless, I paid this guy in Pretoria to defend me against false accusations only to hear him say:  “Since you say you are a blood relative of the Swazi King Mswati's who is 4th cousin to you, why don’t you just emigrate to Swaziland, Mr South African Phiri and stop trying to stop the rotten individuals who are working for an invincible state?”


I could have puked when I heard this flamboyantly dressed lawyer say such in his office around Pretoria’s Church Square in 2004.  How on earth could a lawyer in any democracy say such a thing which effectively translates into elevating corrupt civil servants into gods and goddesses over the citizenry to such an extent that whistle blowers are in this so-called lawyer's  eyes are left with no option but to go to exile ‘just because there is a powerful blood relative in that exile’?

In his own mind, I wondered, what does he think has happened to one of the pillars of law in any civilized land for a lawyer TAKING INSTRUCTIONS FROM HIS OR HER CLIENT?


I am relating here a story that of course happened to me back in 2004 (3 years after being falsely charged by individuals black and white motivated by both politics and racism), but as of 2013 I see more and more incidents of such legal idiots making a mess of accused people's cases in the same fashion.

I have in that respect asked my fellow South Africans (laymen and lawyers alike) if, by any chance, THIS IS CAUSED BY CLIENTS WHO ARE IGNORANT OF THEIR RIGHTS IN THE PRESENCE OF LAWYERS.  But the more prevalent viewpoint from my research is ‘in present-day South Africa DEFENCE LAWYERS come 'to the rescue' (albeit paid-for rescue) of their clients with the pre-conceived idea that the client has no clue of what his or her own case is’!


This basically makes the state and its prosecution right all the time even before the trial begins! And personally as blog author I believe this to be one of the chief reasons why South Africa economically develops not at the speed which we anticipated when we all black and white fought against Apartheid,  if for economic freedom and prosperity for all: IF YOU THROTTLE AND DAMN ALL THE RIGHTEOUS PEOPLE OF THE LAND OF ZION/AZANIA/SOUTH-AFRICA BY MEANS OF THESE IDIOTIC BUT ARROGANT LAWYERS, WHERE IS THE BIBLICAL SALT OF THE EARTH TO CREATE PROGRESS FOR THIS CRADLE OF HUMANKIND AND THE REST OF THE WORLD?


Maybe I am busy dreaming up this problem I see almost every South African Court day, a problem around legal defence counsel where only some weeks ago  I saw a meat-guzzling legally-trained guy running to the point of tripping himself all for a client whose only fault was to ask for a minute for looking for his witness before a trial started in the Court of the magistrate in Mamelodi and the lawyer got palpitations for the sole reason that  the magistrate of the day was white and thus panic-stricken black defence counsel saw himself too black to explain to the honourable magistrate that his client was only out to get his witness without whom his defence case was constitutionally impossible.
If I am dreaming these problems up, well let me ask you if you are South African black or white:How many times have you been legally in trouble or in need of legal services of particularly a lawyer you pay from your hard-earned salary only to find that the constitutional idiot starts dictating to you the client as to what must happen with your case?
“A myriad of times!” I bet that will be your response if indeed you are South African, particularly black.
Indeed it is still a very sick society this one, and these well-trained dogs of ours as citizens (be they South African lawyers standing for the accused in particular, or civil servants of all stripe and stature if even as high as the state presidency of the day) should know and understand that, as it is said in the great Afrikaans Language of South Africa “(Al dra ‘n aap ‘n goue ring hy bly maar net ‘n aap) The monkey wearing the golden ring still remains a monkey”.
What this means is: the fact that you individually make a lot of money out of the position us 50-million-or-so South Africans gave you as our senior civil servant CHANGES NEVER YOUR STATUS AS OUR SERVANT AND YOU SHOULD THEREFORE NEVER GET TOO BIG-HEADED BECAUSE OF THE DOLLARS IN YOUR POCKET FOR WE WILL ONE DAY MAKE YOU PAY FOR THAT VANITY OF YOURS.
Blog author’s plea is: Please do start respecting citizens, Good People Who Are Servants For Civil Society In South Africa.

Good People, Please do Take instructions very properly if you happen to land in attorney’s shoes and do not try to be a Smart Alec on Phiri’s  case just because Phiri’s case is part and parcel of your statistics.  Please try to remember that  YOU ARE NOT THE ONE ACCUSED OF MURDER, RAPE ETC. (but I am)!
In the same vein, if you are state president, cabinet minister, executive mayor, member of parliament, chief justice or any of the fancy positions, STOP TELLING THE NATION ABOUT YOUR PEDIGREE AND WHERE YOUR PARENTS CAME FROM AND WENT FOR WE DON’T CARE ABOUT THAT HISTORY OF THIS DAMN SERVANT OF OURS CALLED YOU!
I mean, we really do not want to read your biography; reading in any case has the side-effect of corrupting an individual’s mind, particularly when you read such rubbish as over-exalted biographies of South African politicians serving in government of any day.  Please save us from that anguish and  mental pollution.  We plead that you  just do your damn civil-servant’s work that we employed your for, since that is what democracy essentially is!

Mr JONATHAN SHAPIRO AND SOUTH AFRICA’S PREMIER CARTOONIST

Despite all the writing I might have achieved above,   I have a heart-rending confession to make.  It is the fact that I must be a very bad servant for the craft of any wordsmith or  writer.  In that respect, I also most unfortunately forgot a simple English adage that teaches us: ‘brevity is the soul of with’.  In other words, I now feel I  I talked and wrote too much hereinabove when in fact I should have said:
“Happy birthday, Zapiro!  It has been a long time since that fateful Monday 55 years ago when your mother gave South Africa the wonderful gift that you have been for the local democracy. Twenty-thousand-and-ninety days of life is nothing to sniff at when some of us still only dream to reach that age.  But far more importantly, you have in my view strengthened our democracy like no other man or woman could.  And if you were a rock star, maybe the picture for this blog would have looked this way:

But how would a guy reading me from China or President Zuma’s Malawi understand who Zapiro was.
May God bless you, my brother, Zapiro (and by the way, I got permission from your mediamen to use that picture and one of the pictures that moved and shook South Africa from your brush)




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