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Senzo Mchunu shafted for fighting blessers

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KwaZulu-Natal ANC chairman Senzo Mchunu. Picture: Tebogo Letsie
KwaZulu-Natal ANC chairman Senzo Mchunu. Picture: Tebogo Letsie

Monday. I am in showroom condition, despite two consecutive days of live music, courtesy of Durban’s Zakifo Festival. And a banging Sunday evening jazz session at The Rainbow. A relatively abstinent lifestyle will cause that, I guess.

A long, nasty week of muckraking lies ahead. With all the street protests and killings over council spots and the Cabinet reshuffle that is likely to follow Premier Senzo Mchunu getting shafted, my chances of an easy week are rather slim.

The whole reshuffle thing has been bugging me, more for the why than the how of it.

I head for the beach and a bodysurfing date with my bra JayNaidoo. Not Big Jay, who ran labour federation Cosatu before it became the ANC labour desk. Big Jay is also a bra, but he’s busy running Rustlers Valley and trying to change the world one cabbage at a time. Top man.

JayNaidoo and I hit the water. Durban’s sun is a golden ball above us, but the ocean takes the breath away at first. There is a wave. It is moshy and closing out, and there is a fair bit of debris in the water. It doesn’t matter. I’ll swim anywhere.

A bit of a right picks me up and I drop. For a couple of seconds I am flying. The ocean is doing all the work; I am just guiding it. Reshuffles, shootings and Mchunus all disappear. The wave closes out.

I jackknife my body, push off the bottom and throw myself out to sea.

I get a rhythm going. The wave gets bigger. I start getting clever, and taking larger and larger rides. I take a big left. I’m flying. It closes out, and I am sucked up and hurled, face first, into the sand. My spine compacts. The lights go out for an instant. I am thrown around like I’m a Checkers packet, until the ocean spits me out.

I’m coughing up sand and seawater, and wondering which hurts more, my head or my back. Then a thought hits me. Mchunu did not get the heave for dodging ANC meetings. Our man got booted because of his war on blessers.

A couple of weeks before being shown the door, Senzo launched an anti-blesser campaign. He hit the road to Mtubatuba, where blessers had apparently been “running amok” and making young girls pregnant.

He pledged about R40 million from discretionary funds to pay for a campaign to force the blessers to hang up their boots. Some Level 33 blesser must have reached out to Luthuli House to shut Mchunu down. It’s blessers 1; Senzo 0.

Enlightened, I make it to my knees and crawl up the beach.

Follow on Twitter @PaddyHarper1

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