Independent on Saturday

Boobs: the conversation grows

WILLIAM SAUNDERSON-MEYER @TheJaundicedEye This is a shortened version of the Jaundiced Eye column that appears on Politicsweb on Saturdays. Follow WSM on Twitter @TheJaundiced Eye LINDSAY SLOGROVE lindsay.slogrove@inl.co.za Slogrove is the news editor

TOURISM Minister Lindiwe Sisulu for the past week or so has been trashing the South Africa Constitution and the judiciary with great enthusiasm in a barrage of articles, social media posts and public declarations. Now she’s upped the ante, calling the president a liar.

This “beautiful Constitution”, Sisulu had said, is no more than a “palliative” which has failed to rescue the “victims of colonialism” from a “sea of poverty”. She dismissed outright the importance of the rule of law, since after all, apartheid and Nazism were underpinned by the same system.

Sisulu reserved particular scorn for the now transformed judiciary’s constitutional role. Black judges, she said, are “mentally colonised” and “confused by foreign belief systems”. Akin to America’s “house Negroes”, they “lick the spittle” of whites and when made “leaders or interpreters of the law … are worse than (their) oppressors”.

Such behaviour is unheard of from a serving Cabinet minister who – as an MP since 1994, with an unbroken 21 years as a minister under four ANC presidents – swore an oath to abide by and uphold the Constitution. So it’s most unusual that Sisulu continues to serve in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s present Cabinet.

What makes it particularly bizarre is that Sisulu is the newest standardbearer for the temporarily sidelined Radical Economic Transformation faction. This is the movement that is championing the interests of disgraced former president Jacob Zuma and his clique of corrupt MPs, ministers and senior government officials seeking to unseat Ramaphosa and his reformists.

Anywhere else in the world, she’d be out on her ear as a disgrace to the party and nation. And if, while serving as an MK soldier during the liberation Struggle, she so presumptuously challenged the ANC’s basic tenets of faith, she would have been cast into one of its “re-education” hell-holes or liquidated.

Timid Cyril’s response was characteristically, well, timid. But Sisulu’s intemperate remarks did cause consternation elsewhere.

Acting Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, while defending the right of anyone to level substantiated criticism against judges, called Sisulu’s remarks “an extraordinary attack” and “probably the worst insult levelled against the judiciary in democratic South Africa”. Sisulu’s conduct was “completely unacceptable” and he added “it would be a pity if it was allowed to stand just like that”.

Justice Minister Ronald Lamola said that “referring to judicial officers by using crude racial tropes cannot pass off as a debate” and that “attacking the very institution that is to uphold the Constitution goes against the grain of everything that we wanted to change from before 1994”, especially since “our Constitution is largely based on the (ANC’s) Freedom Charter”.

However, Lamola also opened convenient wriggle room for the ANC. He noted in his rebuttal – which extolled the transformative tenor of post-1994 Constitutional Court judgments – that her articles were part of “heightened debates on the efficacy of the Constitution, propelled by Minister Sisulu in her personal capacity”. In other words, no need to discipline or fire her.

Silent Cyril eventually this week issued a statement that he had met Sisulu and that she had withdrawn her comments and apologised. Within hours, Sisulu denied this and said she stood by her remarks.

The ball is now in Ramaphosa’s court. Part of his problem is Sisulu’s comments will have some resonance among the growing mass of poverty stricken South Africans. For she is correct that the Constitution has not lifted the masses from poverty and given them work.

But that is not what constitutions do. As civil society groups have rightly reminded Sisulu, that’s what governments do. She is not alone in the ANC as seeing the Constitution as simply a convenient tool that the “people’s party” can use, rejig and discard, as best it suits the ANC’s shifting objectives. Democrats, in contrast, see a national Constitution as a mechanism not for implementing immediate passions, but rather containing them safely.

This was the difference of approach between selfstyled revolutionaries and the democrats, which drove the Great Constitutional Debate during the 1990s transition from apartheid autocracy to non-racial democracy.

Academics and politicians of all ideological and pigmentary hues spent countless hours trying to fashion from the mud of oppression a constitutional framework acceptable to the majority.

Lamola, in his eagerness to let Sisulu off the hook, suggests that she was part of an important ongoing constitutional discourse. Heaven forbid. The last thing we need is a time-wasting examination of how our constitutional innards might be impeding service delivery – a sort of Great Constipational Debate, full of turgidity and flatulence.

Instead, we need to have a president and government that are aware that the problem lies in execution. And that the responsibility lies with the ANC. Will Ramaphosa pick up Sisulu’s perfumed gauntlet?

SOME people got some stuff off their chests after last week’s column about breast reduction and raised some interesting points.

The couch science council lamented the pain and shame some women suffer because of over-large boobs and encouraged readers to sign a petition for medical aids to recognise that reduction surgery is not cosmetic.

One wrote that her late friend had suffered so badly with rashes in the humid Durban summers that the correspondent “actually wrote to a bra manufacturer suggesting they design a bra with removable pads that could absorb perspiration. They did not take up my suggestion (sad/ cross-face emoji)”.

FYI, bra-makers: apart from the sweaty bits, something like this could also be soft enough to help with comfort. If big-breasted women have to strap up in wire and ugliness, with “support straps” that cause shoulders to cave, at least the underbits could be comfy.

She also had some words for carmakers, a problem I had not included but which I instantly hearheared:

“I have also realised that car manufacturers have not taken the female anatomy into account when designing their seat belts.

“While I am an average 36C,

I find the seat belt inevitably sits right across the middle of my left boob and I fear what would happen to it in a sudden stop, or worse, an accident. If I carefully adjust the belt between my boobs it quickly re-adjusts itself across my boob. If I try positioning the belt to the side of my boob the belt goes across my neck and I fear I would be strangled. I’ve even discovered that you can adjust the seat belt by moving it up or down, but whatever position it is in, it still seems to press on my boob.

“I wonder how many other women have this problem and if they have found an answer – or a sympathetic car manufacturer.”

Combine the heat and resultant “glowing” breasts and a seat belt that acts like a mammogram machine, and you get a double whammy here. Even the previously suggested 500g sandbags for medical aid decisionmakers cannot experience the grossness this combo causes.

The most touching one was from a non-working mother.

She said she was using her life savings to get the surgery for her daughter. The young woman, apart from the physical discomfort and pain, had suffered five years of bullying while she was at school. The mother’s hope is that the teenager can start her tertiary education afresh, without the bitchy remarks that have made her life miserable.

The couch thinks the petition should go further and ask that the condition be recognised across the board for the serious issue it is.

So many women do not even have medical aid and get basic primary care at clinics.

There is virtually zero chance that these women could contemplate the weightless freedom reduction surgery would bring. The state providing this relief is perhaps a dream too far considering all the other challenges it faces, including looting and theft.

To sign the petition, go to change.org and search for “breast reduction”.

Please email me if you are willing to share your experiences and join the drive for this change.

METRO

en-za

2022-01-22T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-22T08:00:00.0000000Z

http://independentonsaturday.pressreader.com/article/281629603647320

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