I’ve been hearing a lot about this two-pot retirement system lately. It all happens on Sunday. That should liven up the weekend. Better than getting stabbed. People who know things say it’s a brilliant idea. Problem is, people who know what it means are generally the kind of people who understand how numbers work. And history has proven that these people can’t be trusted. There are others, including myself and most of my friends, who are quite unable to grasp the workings of this new system. We need someone to come around to our homes with bottles of rum and two pots, clay, metal or ceramic, and patiently explain in words and diagrams rather than numbers how this actually works.

It’s incredibly complex. I have a matric and I still can’t grasp it. It’s too esoteric. We South Africans are a literal people. If you ask us to imagine two pots, right away we think of food. This gets us thinking about alcohol because nobody in this country can eat and not drink. What’s in the pots will guide us in our choice of beverage. If for some inexplicable reason it’s just veggies, then maybe wine or vodka. If it’s chicken in one pot and beef in the other, then beer or brandy and Coke.

But these are not cooking pots the sorcerers are talking about. They are money pots. From what I gather, you can withdraw from one but not the other. This makes no sense. The ANC has taught us that if there is money in two pots, you take both the money and the pots. And your neighbour’s pots.

I get that it has something to do with retirement, an alien concept to me and my brethren who failed to plan sensibly for the future, preferring instead to squander and splurge when times were good and curl up in the foetal position when they weren’t. Sadly, according to the law of diminishing returns, a tipping point is reached whereupon the bad times begin overtaking the good at an unexpectedly rapid rate. Like dogs. One minute they’re playful puppies, then they’re loyal companions, and then they’re dead.

Money’s lifespan is unpredictable. It can last forever or run out at the worst possible time. Nobody understands why or how this happens. It just does. It’s like love. You can have plenty of it one day and none the next. They come and go, love and money, often randomly and with no assurances that either will ever return.

Anyway. This is not the time for second-rate homespun philosophies. My job here is to help my fellow innumerates understand esoteric concepts like retirement and the two-pot system.

Actually, and I hate to admit this, if you are relying on me to explain what Zwelinzima Vavi calls a scam and an exploitative capitalist tool, it’s probably too late for you. And me. We have all left it way too late. I blame my parents. And my teachers. And both wives and all my girlfriends. To be fair, my mother did try to instil in me a respect for money. But when you’re 10 years old and getting a pittance in pocket money, there’s no point in trying to save. You might as well spend it all at once at the corner shop. The number of times my father found me in a hyperglycemic coma at the bottom of the garden, having to pour homebrewed beer into my slackjawed mouth to revive me.

When I was growing up, there was no need for teachers to tell us about the importance of money. We were young and white and jobs were guaranteed. There was an abundance of lovely white girls who would give us lovely white children who would also be guaranteed jobs and husbands and wives and we would never be poor and nothing and no one but God could ever kill us and even then it was unlikely because we were His favourite people and He loved us very much.

The Apostle Paul said that money is the root of all evil. I had to google the quote. To be honest, I was a bit surprised to discover that it was an apostle who said it. I was even more surprised that I didn’t have a clear idea of who or what an apostle was. I once lived in Camps Bay below the Six Apostles. Might have been more. I never got around to counting them. I don’t know what else Paul said or did. For all I know, Google is the root of all evil.

As I was saying before I rudely interrupted myself, the government claims it is trying to help us save ourselves from living off cat food and being eaten by rats in our old age. It is every government’s duty to force its citizens to do things against their will, and we have every right to be suspicious of their motives. Two pots? I can’t put my finger on it, but something doesn’t sound right. Look, don’t take my word for it. Do whatever you like. But if they’re telling us that we now have two pots when we used to have one, there’s a very good chance that there are other pots out there that they aren’t telling us about. It’s not even their money. It’s ours. And if we want to spend it all as quickly as possible, we should be allowed to. After years of being burdened by the state, it’s time to turn the tables.