Yet another sad, sad day in SA. This is why we can’t have nice things. I’ve just learnt that, because of an outcry by the usual interfering citizens and sanctimonious do-gooders who plague the country, we won’t be getting our glorious R22m giant flag. What an opportunity missed!
All the great countries of the world have erected symbols expressing the enormous regard in which their governments hold their people. In Turkmenistan, good ol’ Gurbanguly “Never met a horse I didn’t like” Berdymukhamedov — president from 2006 to 2022 and now succeeded in suspicious circumstances by his son — has a huge monument in Ashgabat, the capital city. It features him sitting astride his golden horse, and is described by Wikipedia as being cast in bronze and covered in 24ct gold leaf. It soars over 20m from the ground and is perched on a massive outcrop of white marble cliff.
In North Korea, they have giant, 20m bronze statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.
Perhaps we should have asked the North Koreans to build our big flagpole. That country did, after all, build Africa’s tallest statue, the almost 50m African Renaissance Monument in Dakar, Senegal, at an estimated cost of $27m.
I’ve seen that statue, and it really is a jarring, inappropriate intrusion on the skyline. I can’t beat this description from the Public Delivery arts site: “The monument portrays a man with a bare, ripped torso, holding an infant in one arm and guiding a woman with the other hand. The baby points ahead to signify the wonderful future. The woman extends her arm behind in a gesture to acknowledge the troubled past as her hair and the scant, gossamer-like dress are swept back by the wind.”
And to prove that not much has changed in the way governments bent on putting propaganda before people miss the picture, here’s some criticism of the Senegalese president at the time, which our own sports, arts & culture minister Nathi Mthethwa might take to heart. “He’s gone senile. Spending all this money when our education system is in crisis, when our infrastructure is crumbling, it’s outrageous.”
And to think we could have joined this illustrious list with our 100m flagpole. Alas.
Accepting that a phallic flagpole is a way to inject some sort of tumescence into the government’s flabby performance, all I can say is: Minister, you’re going to need a bigger flagpole
I know what you’re thinking. Do we really need another monument to vanity, avarice, greed and the death of our democratic dream? Don’t we already have thousands of kilometres of destroyed railway lines, for example? Surely that’s the perfect symbol, the rusted, plundered rails like diseased veins flowing into the towns and stations that stand in for the body parts of our broken body politic, infecting our country with a gangrenous economic breakdown?
Don’t we already have the perfect symbol in Tshwane’s HM Pitje Stadium, built at a cost of R140m, never used, and now going to cost Gauteng sports, arts, culture & recreation a whopping R84m to demolish? Or, as the Daily Maverick precisely notes, R84,961,596.71. Now that is a lovely, lovely symbol of our country.
Around the world, your more sophisticated corrupt official tends to go the route of overcharging, then building a hugely inferior product for citizens to use, and skimming the profits. Not here! No — we don’t even bother pretending that citizens are getting something to use. Build, demolish, tender. The cycle of (ANC) life.
Even better, like much of our public infrastructure — and we mentioned the railways earlier — the stadium has already been practically destroyed by scavengers and looters. Or, as the DA’s spokesperson for sports, arts, culture & recreation in Gauteng, Kingsol Chabalala, puts it: “Bear in mind that the R84.9m in question here is not even part of rebuilding the stadium, but a budget to only demolish a structure that is already on its knees.”
He also said the only visible sign that the stadium ever existed “is a crumbling cement grandstand. Bricks, iron, wood, seats, lights and even the goalposts have been stolen.”
But as we know, the mainscream™ media loves to exaggerate. “The Gauteng department of infrastructure development’s spokesperson Bongiwe Gambu claimed that the estimated cost of the demolition project was only R26.8m and not R84.9m, as alleged by Chabalala,” Daily Maverick reports.
Only R26.8m to demolish an already pillaged stadium! Why, that’s only a little more expensive than a big flag.
If you’re looking for a peculiarly SA perspective on this idea that you can get some reasonable, cost-effective corruption-cum-incompetence if you shop around, look no further than TimesLIVE’s story on what other large flags cost. It turns out that Mthethwa, champion of the poor and bargain-basement demagogue, is getting our nation a bit of a bargain. Which I assume is what we said about Medupi power station, before its initial cost estimate of R56bn-R80bn ran to what Eskom now expects to be R135bn.
Saudi Arabia’s 171m flagpole, the largest in the world, cost R79m; Tajikistan’s Dushanbe flagpole, the second-largest at 165m, cost about R55m; the third-largest, at 162m in Azerbaijan, cost a huge R380m. Our R22m is peanuts by comparison — though mind you, so is its size, at a mere 100m.
Given the truly shattering impotence our government has displayed over the years, and accepting that a phallic flagpole is a way to inject some sort of tumescence into its flabby performance, all I can say is: Minister, you’re going to need a bigger flagpole.
As Twitter user Rustum Kozain angrily put it: “What pisses me off even more than a wasted R22m is the total lack of imagination. I mean, a big fucking flag pole and a big fucking flag. That’s all. The minister and a bunch of apparatchiks googled a bit and saw a big-ass flag in the US and said: That’s it! Let’s do this!”
I agree. What’s truly annoying is that our government apparently thinks we’re all patriotic idiots who will forget about state capture if we have a big flag to marvel at.
You can clearly see this tendency of our government to take its citizens for fools in Mthethwa’s media release, which reluctantly backs down from the project and tries to spin it as a victory.
“Over the past few days the minister of sport, arts & culture has followed and taken note of public discourse that has unfolded in respect of the envisaged monumental flag. The diversity of voices around this important heritage project are a welcome celebration of our country’s vibrant constitutional democracy and the freedoms that must be upheld beyond posterity. It also bodes well for one of the pillars of social cohesion which is an active citizenry. In upholding these [sic] ethos and the inalienable rights of citizens to be heard, the minister of sport, arts & culture has directed his department to review the process related to the monumental flag in its totality.”
Leaving aside the puzzling hubris of wanting our democratic values to last “beyond posterity” — ie, actually outlive all future generations of South Africans — it is just such patronising garbage. Are we supposed to believe that this was all a clever democratic intervention to galvanise us into becoming a more active citizenry?
No, minister, the truth is that you’ve given us yet another symbol of just how out of touch the governing party is with its citizens, and how little it cares. The beautiful thing about your giant flag is that you didn’t even need to build it. It is a symbol that will endure.
The flag debacle shows the government’s tendency to take us for fools; to assume we’ll forget about state capture if we have a big enough flag to marvel at
— What it means:
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