Take your pie and waai

You might think it’s enough that we have to contend with a corrupt, indolent government fronted by a venal, incompetent president, but it’s not. Far from it. This godless cluster of hustlers and harlots make up just one slice of the putrefying pie that South Africans have to eat every day of their lives.

Luckily for the president and his vile coterie of delinquents and desperados, we, the people, have an extraordinary capacity for tolerating whatever is dealt out to us without complaint.

Another big slice of this toxic pie is made up of the parastatals and the private sector. The little that remains of the pie is infested with robbers, rapists and murderers. Right, that’s enough about pies.

Speaking of corporate douchebaggery, I always thought it odd that we went from daily power blackouts to business as usual virtually overnight and nobody ever really explained how that happened. Now, thanks to the Dentons report, we know it was a scam by certain people in Eskom to enrich themselves and their buddies through emergency fuel sales. It was a manufactured crisis. Treason charges should apply.

Earlier this week, a court awarded a one billion rand settlement to Comair after it found that SAA wrongly offered travel agents incentives to book people on this pathetic excuse of a state-owned airline. Travel agents are like estate agents. Buy them a bottle of gin and they’ll do whatever you ask. By the way, don’t gloat about the fine. Ultimately, you’ll be paying it through the inevitable government bailout.

Now we hear that seventeen banks – including our very own Standard Bank, Absa and Investec – are to be prosecuted for fixing the rand. This makes no sense. The rand has been broken for a long time. Isn’t it a good thing that someone’s trying to fix it? Apparently not. Apparently there has been massive skulduggery afoot for the last ten years at least. It has something to do with colluding on spreads for spot trades, creating fictitious bids and offers at agreed times and manipulating prices in foreign currency trading. Gibberish to me and you, but the Competition Commission seems to understand it.

Essentially, it boils down to men in dark suits and cocaine moustaches making late-night calls to one another on secure lines and even on WhatsApp to distort supply and demand in such a way that they get rich and we get screwed. It’s now up to the Competition Tribunal to listen to the lies unleashed by the lawyers of these treacherous weasels and, hopefully, deliver unto them their just deserts. In other words, strip them naked and organise a lottery where ordinary people can win tickets to line up and whip them as they crawl through the streets.

Every time the rand dips in value, the thin-lipped hollow-eyed economists are trotted out to explain it in terms we can all understand. Market forces, economies of trading partners, price of oil, inflation blah blah blah. Not once have any of them suggested the rand is unconscious in the back of a fiscal ambulance as a singular result of collusion by the banks themselves. Are the economists gullible, lazy or part of this conspiracy themselves? Strip them naked and flog them.

In 2015, the rand lost 26% of its value in six months. We were told it was because the People’s Bank of China devalued the yuan by two percent. We scratched our heads and looked puzzled, then stuffed a boerie roll into our faces and ordered another round.

Bankers are usurers. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, usurers are placed in the inner ring of the seventh circle of hell, along with the blasphemers and the sodomites. Banks shouldn’t be allowed to have things like soccer stadiums named after them. Banks should only be allowed to lend their names to cemeteries, hospitals, homeless shelters, lunatic asylums and anywhere else we might end up when they foreclose on our homes and repossess our children.

Banks are bleak places. Bleaker even than post offices and funeral parlours. There is no music. Nobody smiles or laughs. If anyone talks, it’s in hushed tones, hands over mouths, little shakes of the head, a quick widening of the eyes. Does money really command the kind of respect you might expect to find at a wake for the Queen of England? Of course it does.

I get anxious in banks. Not only because they can seal the doors electronically and trap me inside, but also because I sense they somehow know I’m planning the robbery in my head. I check out the cameras and guards, the distance from the tellers to the exit. I try to locate the doors leading to the vaults. Decide who I’d take hostage. I bet I’m not the only who does this.

Everyone looks miserable because a bank is the only place of business where you hand over bags of cash and walk out empty-handed. There’s not the natural give-and-take of commerce. Sure, you can also walk out with money, but it’s hard to get excited when you know it was your money all along. They were just keeping it for you because you’re an idiot and can’t be trusted to look after it.

Even dentist’s waiting rooms are more cheerful than banks. They at least have music, magazines, comfy couches and children’s toys. Banks have nowhere to sit and nothing to distract you. All they offer are long queues and tellers who refuse to meet your eye then disappear for long periods of time for no apparent reason. And television sets telling you that if you haven’t started saving for your retirement by the time you’re 35, you’re almost certain to die a sad and lonely death.

It was Shakespeare who said, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loseth both itself and friend. And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” I have never fully understood what the smarmy little gaylord was on about, but I do know that he failed to foresee the effect that banking would have on spam.

How I long for the days when one’s in-box was cluttered with the nourishing solicitations of honest merchants who wished nothing more than to provide us with equine peni and erections sturdy enough to serve as construction site cranes.

Now, thanks to the bankers, our in-boxes have become low-rent repositories for all manner of bloodsucking leeches who gather to feed off our pain. The sex-mongers have slunk away to lick their wounds along those desolate, unlit stretches of the information superhighway where none care to venture.

It was only yesterday that our shining eyes, so filled with hope, were ineluctably drawn to subject lines that said, “View the red-hot sluts in your area now!” Today, the subject lines say, “View the foreclosed homes in your area now!”

Roll up, folks. These homes are being given away. Hurry, hurry, hurry before the previous owners sell their kidneys and move back in.

Not long ago, infidelity was “Michael’s” stock in trade. But, thanks to the bankers, the bottom has fallen out of the lonely housewives’ market. “Michael’s” subject line no longer reads, “I found you a smokin’ hot married mama.” Now it says, “I found you a new job.”

Is this the brave, new world we were promised? A world where we would rather work than get laid? Rather look at pictures of empty houses than naked women?

Those ravening banker beasts have a lot to answer for.

• Durban Poison