In this country, fashion trumps SONA

It has taken me 4 days to find the right words to say this. The words have just been evading me. Anyhow, here I go...

If I was good enough to be a published author, I would have long released an award-winning book. The title of the book would be POLITICIANS REFLECT WHO WE ARE. It would be a long missive of 17 chapters... no wait, 20 chapters (1994-2014) to be exact. Through it I'd argue why I think our politicians reflect the people they are leading.

I know that I am going to get lynched for saying this but, there must be something horribly wrong with a nation which sleeps through their state president's SONA one evening and wake up the next morning to jam the social media with the horrible dress sense of Chairperson of a parliamentary portfolio committee.

It takes a very silly, and a not focused nation, to drive a very confident, "I am big and beautiful" woman like Chairperson in pumpkin (by that I mean colour) dress into fainting upon touching down the airport on her way from work.

Need I mention that this violence on a woman was unleashed because - oh what a silly nation we are - the SONA has become a fashion spectacle, drawing thousands and thousands of spectators wanting to "judge" the fashion sense of politicians? Forget that the address is the last one before the national elections.

I need not mention, also, that our president gave the address right in the middle of a "burning" country. And all we could do was to send a pregnant politician into hospital about nothing in the way of her ability, or lack thereof, to perform her parliamentary oversight duties but because she dared to hop into a dress before hitting the red carpet in Cape Town.

And here is the thing which I believe - if Lebo Pule can remember - will exonerate me for arguing that patriarchy is a system being managed by women. They are the CEOs, and men are simply the grateful shareholders who always, century after century, walk away with obscene profits from this lucrative business.

The public banter and ridicule had the scores of women leading the assault on the Chairperson. Of all those women who participated in the stampede, none of them, at least as far as I am concerned, have ever praised or criticized the concerned Chairperson for her work in parliament.

All what we will know of her from today is not a chairperson who wakes up every morning to play oversight role, or cover-up, depending on how you may look at parliament portfolio committees, but an insignificant woman who knows not how to dress for the occasion.

Chairperson, how you dress means more to us than the work that you are doing in Cape Town.