THE FUSE

It was the state of emergency that South Africa’s local government system has long needed. An ice-cold bucket of water that a family matriarch throws at a hungover husband or son to force them to wake up and go to work. Or the harsh corporal punishment that schools meted out in the bad old days (some would say the good old days) to bring into line some errant students. (As an aside, is it just not ironic that many of us who went through that corporal punishment era speak so nostalgically about how it made us better adults while also extolling the Constitutional Court’s decision to outlaw the violent punishment of minors. This lowly newspaperman is one of them, he admits shamefully.)