Yes, most South Africans are unemployed, and many of those who do have jobs regularly have to choose between food, heating and medication.
Most will never come close to being able to afford to retire, but can we please take a moment to think of the literal torture Gayton McKenzie has to endure when he can’t fly business class?
The sobering realities of McKenzie’s personal hell, which sees him chained like Prometheus to the mountain of ministerial employment, were brought home last week as the minister for sport and also sometimes culture if the selfies are worth it, provided a gut-wrenching written reply to parliamentary questions about expenditure on travel.
Expecting ministers to fly economy, he explained, while they suffered “relentless working conditions week in and week out”, was “impractical and even sadistic”. Why, just recently, he revealed, he had had to spend — reader, do not scream — “a whole day on four separate flights to reach Gambia, all in very cramped and — nevertheless — expensive economy class because business class was not even an option”.
As I read on, something became terribly clear, and not just that McKenzie’s speechwriter likes dramatic pauses on either side of “nevertheless”: the minister is trapped between a rock and a hard place, or at very last an economy class seat and the back of another economy class seat.
First, he explained, there is the unavoidable fact that some deals need to be negotiated in person, or, as he put it, “you can’t expect Formula One to come to our country if all we do is send them a few friendly emails”.
McKenzie has been accused of being a Trumpian populist, but in this instance he was speaking gospel truth. Luring F1 to one’s country is, in fact, a famously tricky process, what with needing a cloudless night with a full moon and a south wind so that the smell of the goats’ blood drifts in just the right direction, before the seven virgins recite the binding spell and the accountants bring forth the ledgers to prove that you’re good for the billions and billions and billions of rand a Grand Prix is going to cost your country. It’s a whole thing.
But even more troubling, it turns out, is what happens if you get all idealistic and try to save a few pennies, with the minister revealing that “the hue and cry” over the cost of his trip to the Paris Olympics “actually caused the Formula One executives to ask me if SA should even be thinking of bringing a Formula One race to its shores if the cost of one ministerial trip is such a big deal”.
Do you see the diabolical layers of McKenzie’s suffering now, you tight-fisted ingrates, and how your penny-pinching might rob us of a grand prix? He isn’t demanding business class seats for himself: he’s doing it for all of us. If it was up to him, he’d fly in stowage. Hell, just duct-tape him to the wing and give him a Fizzer to chew on and he’ll endure any amount of “sadism”. But if he doesn’t get in-flight champagne the oligarchs won’t even let him in the door.
No, let us pause and think of what he is enduring for us. Cynics point at those four flights to Gambia, and the almost R100,000 they cost, all to attend an “interministerial meeting to enhance Africa’s sports governance”, and they see pure satire. But we know what it was. It was noble, heroic self-sacrifice.
A moment’s silence for McKenzie’s numb buttocks, if you please …
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist
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