IN Zimbabwe, a funny little sesquipedalian called George Charamba is the press secretary at the ministry of information, which makes him President Robert Mugabe’s official spokesman. At the state-owned Herald, where he is a columnist, he is known as Nathaniel Manheru. Charamba or Manheru is prolific; he is outrageous, childish, venomous — and totally brilliant at his job.
It is thanks largely to him that so many Africans and Scandinavian sympathisers and other useless apologists genuinely believe Mugabe’s land-reform policies of the late 1990s and early 2000s were a legitimate means to the economic emancipation of Zimbabwe. It is thanks to Charamba’s masterful stoking of nationalism, that blind racial solidarity has flourished to the point where it occupies a significant percentage of national identity.
Forget about the Chinese "stealing" African women or killing citizens’ dogs to sell to restaurants. Forget about the curious technology used in the elections and the duplicity of wealthy white Zimbabweans. Charamba’s lines have won. White is bad. Land is everything.
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One photograph explains everything about Hlaudi Motsoeneng. In it, men of the cloth surround the high chancellor of the SABC, their hands placed on his head. The image was captured at a prayer session when dark forces were apparently rampant in Auckland Park. But religion, to people like this, is like the law to President Jacob Zuma: occasionally useful, but most of the time open to interpretation.
These were not priests but charlatan shamans, who split their sermons between the Old Testament and the time when fish could talk and mingled among the village elders, muttering their opinions on the fiscal deficit before retiring to their ponds.
It has fallen to retired journalist Ed Herbst to answer the question everyone appears too politically correct or frightened to ask: how did Motsoeneng get there? He isn’t qualified to occupy his position — but his father allegedly is or was "an ancestral adviser" to Zuma, something the president takes extremely seriously. If this is true, Motsoeneng was appointed because his dad is or was Number One’s personal druid.
I’ve seen Motsoeneng’s future, and it doesn’t end well. Alistair Campbell, former British prime minister Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, is regarded somewhere between loathing and revulsion — a space he shares with Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s former hatchet man. Andy Coulson, David Cameron’s spin doctor, went to jail. But what makes Motsoeneng’s future so much worse is that he doesn’t propagate a political line as much as he does a spiritual one. Despite the accentuated collars and the exceedingly loud shirts, he is literally a man from centuries ago.
It is only a matter of time before power deludes him into perceived immortality, something he may well tempt by painting himself with a substance his father would probably claim to be bulletproof lotion, climbing into a wine barrel and asking someone to push him over Victoria Falls. I imagine the act will be closely monitored by the SABC executive, who will witness this after the customary drinking of aardvark blood that Motsoeneng has probably insisted replace the "welcome" section of board meetings.
Charamba’s run of extraordinary success is about to be halted. The thread between Zanu-PF and war veterans — the group solely responsible for Mugabe’s political survival — appears to have been severed and could mean a Ceausescu-esque end for the spin-meister. But the end for Motsoeneng will be far more unpleasant.
In a scenario resembling both Idi Amin in Saudi Arabia or Napoleon on St Helena, Motsoeneng is heading for exile on some remote island in a Liberian river once leased by US big pharma, which nuked it beyond habitation with anxiety pill tests.
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He will have done something so silly or so naughty that even our own Credo Mutwa would have begged the authorities to admit him. And it is here he will lie on something akin to an Egyptian deathbed, twitching, his yellow eyes rolling around wildly, while a group of home-made exorcists with webbed feet chant around him, threatening to turn each other into cows.
• Reader works for an energy investment and political advisory firm
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