A FAMOUS GROUSE

A DUNG beetle crawled into the Mahogany Ridge this week and asked the barman, “Is this stool taken?” Actually no, that’s not true; it wasn’t a dung beetle, just one of the more bibulous regulars complaining of a Kafkaesque nightmare in the north.

We had no idea what he was on about, but it must have been serious if he was using the K-word. “What’s bugging you?” we asked. 

After some encouragement with brandy, he was able to spit it out. It was the “flirty” text messages that Marius Fransman had sent to 20-year-old Louisa Wynand in the days before he was alleged to have sexually assaulted her, en route to the ANC’s anniversary celebrations in Rustenburg in January.

The publication of the messages has prompted a renewed police investigation into the benighted Western Cape ANC leader’s behaviour.

These developments have troubled Fransman’s lawyer, Mushtak Parker, who has suggested that it would be “perplexing” if Northern Cape prosecutors proceeded with a sexual assault case after prosecutors in the North West had dropped the matter, citing insufficient evidence.

And so the likelihood that Fransman finds himself a person of interest to investigators in Kimberley but not to those in Mahikeng. These are two remote backwaters separated by not much more than a few sheep and thorn trees. 

Little wonder that the Daily Maverick has described this sordid business as “a baffling and Kafkaesque bureaucratic ‘jurisdictional’ nightmare”.

Fransman, however, does not strike us as a particularly literary person, much less a Kafka lover. What does he know of existentialism and the alienation encountered by those isolated individuals who must square off against incomprehensible bureaucracy? Has he, for example, ever had dealings with Home Affairs in the quest for an unabridged birth certificate? 

But he certainly can bang on like someone who’s been done a wrong. First, it was that prattle of “honey traps”, that his enemies in the ANC were conspiring to bring about his downfall. Now there’s a whining on about a trial by media.

“It is a sad reality,” Fransman has said, “that through the consistent media leaks of biased information, I am not being afforded the rights as listed in the Constitution. Just as the complainant has rights, so does the accused, one of which is the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.”

It is another unhappy and perhaps ironic reality that a man who cannot even conduct a proper adulterous relationship should now still aspire to be a politician. If you can’t cheat on your wife and get away with it, what hope for misleading the people?

Sadder still is that analysis of Fransman’s texting has revealed a certain underdevelopment in character. There’s little more more pathetic, more desperate, than a grown man attempting to impress a young woman less than half his age with cringeworthy “youthiness”, to show that he, too, is “hip” to the “scene”; he knows the “buzz” and is no boring old fart.

There was such a richness of embarrassments here we hardly knew where to begin. 

Was it the repeated spelling of “cool” as “kewl”? Or the requests for selfies, now regarded as first base in the sexting age? Or the suggestion that Wynand not inform her boyfriend, or “bf”, of her new “job”? All of this can be seen as semaphore that, despite the old school moustache, this ain’t no headmaster no more, baby.

What about that creepy suggestion — and once again apologies to Franz Kafka — that clothing of a certain, perhaps diaphanous nature be worn for the trip? Exactly what sort of metamorphosis was envisaged here?

Perhaps the most troubling of the texts concerned Fransman’s disclosure that he was listening to John Lennon’s Imagine and his “Hope that U will learn to sing that.” This was so awful that the Ridge regulars were immediately seized by visions of grubby old men in raincoats outside high schools trying to entice young girls into vans with battered Elton John and David Bowie records. 

Which was a bit like the Youth Day celebrations at Orlando Stadium on Thursday, was it not? 

Here, on an occasion to mark a momentous event in our history, hundreds of youngsters gathered to hear one particularly irrelevant old duffer with a mindset firmly mired in the 19th century give a lecture about the many ills that affect the youth of today. There was drink, there was drugs, there was even — irony of ironies — the “sex stokvels” in taverns, where men of an advanced age bid against one another for the right to spend the night with young women.

But not a word from President Jacob Zuma about how his administration has failed the youth.