When the Minister sleeps on the job, civilians suffer insomnia

I had thought that this tormenting incident of national importance would blow away with the 2013 wind, but it did not.

Admit it, folks. All of us are scarred by something which happened in the past… something which, conveniently or bizarrely, has left us horrified, more so because the circumstances around it could not be explained. That thing is not necessarily personal. It is something bordering on ethics, or trust and it involves some trusted person or institution.

For example, I still cannot understand how a person can outmaneuver competency clearance, bypass security protocol and carry out the national duty on a world’s stage. As we speak, the concerned officials are still investigating, and the person at the centre of the storm is bizarrely biding his time in the psychiatric ward somewhere.

I know. It sounds like old boring news already. But wait until I bore you to death with much older news. To me this is a quagmire.

South Africa, every time I think about Minister Siyabonga Cwele, and his wife’s sophisticated misdeeds, which happened behind his (minister of intelligence) back, I suffer a serious insomnia! I kid you not. I have not been sleeping soundly ever since.

Every now and then I wake up screaming, sweating, and trembling like a leaf. Just the other night I saw Mrs Cwele kiss her husband in the forehead and saying, ‘My shift has begun; sleep tight.’ She wore leather jacket, jeans and snobbish boots. That was fine. The nightmare struck me when hubby, with that suspicious smile of his and roving eyes, replied, ‘Don’t get caught.’ I swear that dream is the source of my insomnia.

If president Zuma could ask for my HR input on how to deal with this performance deficit on the part of his “trusted” minister, for the sake of my much needed sleep, I’d suggest to president that he inserts an item in the minister’s performance contract. It would read something like this: You shall not sleep on the job. From now on, your wife is your job.