HUMOUR

The Best Things in Life are Damn Expensive

Being a journalist in a province that is dying for media publicity can sometimes make one pretty spoiled. You get used to freebies to the point that you think they are an entitlement. Free hotel accommodation, free t-shirts and golf shirts, free carry-bags, free pens and pads, free breakfast lunch and dinner, free beer and if you are smart enough free female media officers and clerks - this is called free love, especially after that third pint of Storm.

No wonder for the past five years I have been trying hard to get some shrink at the Promenade Centre to pyschoanalyze me but everytime I tried to have it done I'm told that it's bloody expensive - but useful. The shrinks I have been to refuse to do it even when I tell them that I am actually working on a story on psychoanalysis and would like to know if it is really accurate and helpful. They tell me to get the accounts people at the newspaper where I'm corresponding to pay at least half of the total amount. I always plead that they will get free publicity because I'll mention them to which they respond that my newspaper is charging them for adverstising as we speak.

See, they are not like bars and pubs where my media credentials alone guarantees that I can drink the whole bar and still be offered a maxi taxi to drop me at Bundu Lodge - all at the bar's expense - and that call in the morning to ask me how is the headache.

Now, when African National Congress President Jacob Zuma was psychoanalysed day in and day out on television following his victory at Polokwane, his recharging by the National Prosecutions Authority and his traditional wedding I asked how does an unemployed man from rural Nkandla afford to pay for all the psychoanalyis on etv, SABC, CNBC and international media by top shrinks? They asked them 'why is he smiling while giving these gifts to these learners even though he was served with an indictment yesterday'. To which the shrink would respond, 'they don't call him Gedleyihlekisa for nothing you know. He's a charmer'. I asked how does poor Zuma afford to pay all these people dissecting his thinking as if it was oysters at a Sushi Bar while my smile does not command a mere a smile in return?

I was told that he's being psychoanalysed for free. Wow! I rushed back to Promenade Centre and told the shrink who has since matured in five years of my absent nagging and demanded, 'give me the free one that is afforded Zuma as well'.

They told me that I needed to be charged with a crime, wed four wives and kick [Thabo] Mbeki's ass before I'm afforded a free psychoanalysis like Zuma. Huh, such a tall order; look I don't even have a single free girlfriend and I can't kick a dog's ass even if it munched my Achilles heel. How about that? Where will I get 15 cattle to marry a Zulu maiden? Being charged for a crime is something but I must first be detained at Acornhoek Police Station where my chances of being killed by thugs equal those of being robbed my cellphone. And here I was thinking; the best things in life are free.