This is satire

Dear Donald,

Comrade. Friend. Trailblazer. The sight of you in that courtroom last week with what can only be described as a stone face and bad posture filled my heart with pride and joy.

But why, Jacob? you ask. Well, buddy, it is because for once Africa set the trend and the US followed.

You see, long before you arrived at the courthouse of New York, the former presidents of Africa had made the same trip in the cities of Khartoum, Pietermaritzburg and Sierra Leone.

Your willingness to embrace this cultural exchange of groundbreaking ideas on how to destroy democracy must be commended. I am compelled, however, to inform you that there is still work to be done.

My good orange man, showing face in court is not enough. Even though you have performed admirably thus far, you must see this thing through and taste life inside the slammer, or, as we like to call it, the tjoekie.

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Don, I can share with you that the rewards for making it to that level in the game of martyrdom are astonishing. It seems nothing mobilises sympathisers quite like the sight of their leader in prison clothes.

Your followers stormed your white castle in Washington, DC, on 6 January in their thousands. Well, I raise your storming with looting by hundreds of thousands nationwide.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, the damage my supporter base did in mere days during that time to national infrastructure is far greater than what yours managed over four years.

I’m going to stop short of saying we’re saints – we can leave that to the historians to decide – but to my mind we are most certainly not criminals.

And while we’re being honest, I must say that the turnout for your arraignment in New York was pitiful. From what I saw on CNN, the majority of the people there seemed to be paid journalists. Not a single shop window was broken.

The police on the scene looked bored out of their minds and so was I as I sat in the TV room watching a closed door in the hallway of a court building that seemed like it would never open. The analysts discussed the architecture of the building to pass time!

It was dead air, Donald. As a demagogue, you really should try harder.

I’m sad to say that the Zuma household did not watch the broadcast in its entirety for throughout I was under direction from my many wives to change the channel. And, would you believe it, I mostly complied.

For large parts of your day in court (I really wish you had worn handcuffs) we watched South African true crime shows on our equivalent of cable television that is ambitiously called Showmax.

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Don, what the people did in those shows was truly awful and it got me wondering, brother, whether what we did can even be considered a crime. I mean, I slept in on a court date and you paid (handsomely, I might add) a person to actually do less than what they intended to do in the first place.

Where is the harm in that?

I’m going to stop short of saying we’re saints – we can leave that to the historians to decide – but to my mind we are most certainly not criminals. I did pick up a word in one true crime episode that, I think, sums up both you and me perfectly. It’s a pleasant-sounding word and here it is so try it on for size: sociopath.

I didn’t quite get the meaning of the word, but my intuition and logical mind tell me it refers to someone who shows the path to social change. Now, isn’t that accurate?

So, let us continue, dear friend, and live out our lives as sociopaths. Let us spread the word on socio media of what is possible when you turn a blind eye to your socio responsibility and go the other way. DM168

Hans Mackenzie Main is a writer and columnist.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.