“Since 1994 the ANC has created close to eight million new jobs.” Who said this?

1. A pathological liar.
2. A man recently emerged from a long coma.
3. Cyril Ramaphosa.
4. All of the above.

Some of you might choose d as the answer, and, quite frankly, you wouldn’t be far wrong. But in the interests of accuracy, let’s stick with c for now. Yes, that was said by our very own president, a man in desperate need of a fresh coat of varnish and a vigorous plumping up like you would a goose-down pillow that’s been sat on by too many people for too long.

I was going to say duck down but goose feathers are softer and better insulated. There is nothing more insulated than our amoebalike leader, Cyril the Submissive. Cyril Coeur de Poulet.

Our ethically supine malva pudding of a president served up this steaming dish of fantasy and fiction at a weekend meeting in Durban called by the ANC’s ironically named National Working Committee.

The NWC was parachuted in (not literally – a parachute that can handle the kind of weight generated by decades of steak and whisky has yet to be invented) in order to gently rap the eThekwini comrades over the knuckles. I say gently because these are Zulus. This is not a nation that takes kindly to being reprimanded, as the British discovered at Isandlwana.

They are already smarting after the government stepped in with a Section 154 intervention. That’s the equivalent of your wife taking the remote control away and not giving it back – not even on Saturdays when the rugby is on.

To be fair, it’s pretty impressive that the leadership still care enough to intervene. Especially since there isn’t a single Zulu in the party’s top seven. It’s almost as if they think Zulus aren’t fit to run anything more complicated than an egg-and-spoon race. Maybe that’s not it. Maybe it’s simply a vested interest thing. Civil servants do love their holidays in Durbs. It wouldn’t do to have the city a filthy, smouldering wreck by December. Nobody expects Khartoum on their annual vacation.

I imagine the ultimate humiliation was having the imperious Fikile Mbalula do some of the scolding. He was born in the one-time independent Boer republic, for heaven’s sake, a province so off the charts that it once banned Indians from living there. Okay, this goes back a bit. But it’s still a province laden with nasty excess baggage.

And when it comes to baggage, you’d be hard put to find any nastier than Mbalula. To be fair, that’s not true. He’s many things, but nasty isn’t really one of them. Obviously, this could change now that he has some power within the party rather than the government. After all, it’s the party that runs the country. I’m being overly generous here in assuming there’s anyone at all running the country.

Mbalula met King Misuzulu at Zimbali Estate, one of King Shaka’s favourite resorts. It was a brave move, given that the king is directly related to the people who slaughtered Piet Retief without breaking a sweat. I’m sure the secretary-general’s protectors didn’t leave their weapons at the door.

Fiks proudly said the ANC had given the king 10 cows as a mark of respect. The king declined to address the media. Of course he did. The alternative would have been a brief speech along the lines of, “More cows? I have cows coming out of my ears. I need an air fryer, not more bloody cows.”

So, anyway. Back to Ramaphosa’s statement about how the ANC has created so many jobs that people in the streets are begging them to stop because they just don’t know what to do with all these jobs. It’s like the king’s cows but with jobs.

As I said, Cyril, like goose down, is very well insulated. I don’t believe his staff or family allow him to read newspapers or watch the news. He’s Bubble Boy who survived to become a politician. R6-billion provides the best cushion to reality. He doesn’t need to know. More pertinently, he doesn’t want to know. There’s no doubt he operates on a “don’t tell and I won’t ask” policy. Like a reverse cowboy to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the army instituted during the degenerate Clinton administration.

If he knew how much he’d fallen in the esteem of so many, surely he’d resign? I like to think so. Then again, I like to think many things, some of which will get me arrested when the ANC forms the Thought Police, which is like the normal police except they can think.

Ramaphosa said the unity of the ANC in eThekwini has to be the main objective, seemingly in the deluded belief that it would spread, osmosis-like, through the province. Bru, the only thing that originates in Durban and spreads through KwaZulu-Natal is primo weed. Legalise trade and you won’t have to worry about anything ever again. A goofed comrade is a good comrade. No more fussing and fighting. Probably no more voting either, but hey, swings and roundabouts.