PRETORIA. Former South African president Thabo Mbeki says that swine flu is caused by poverty and not by pigs, and says he has never personally known anyone who has died from the disease. Meanwhile Jacob Zuma’s camp says that science has shown that swine flu is the product of unnatural sex between species that should remain apart, “like when the gays marry”.
Mbeki has been noticeably absent from the public eye in recent months, but close friends of the former President say he has spent his time posting “important thoughts” on the Internet, bulletin boards at shopping centers, and on photocopied flyers slipped under the windscreen-wipers of cars.
According to a source inside Mbeki’s home, who did not wish to be identified as she wanted to avoid uncomfortable silences at the breakfast table, Mbeki has written up to 6.3 million words in the last fortnight, many of them in full sentences. However, she said she had not read any of the essays as they caused her to bleed out of her eyes and slip into a coma after several paragraphs.
But this morning a defiant Mbeki broke his silence, saying that it was important for the medical fraternity not to be misled by “the agenda of the major veterinary pharmaceuticals companies”.
“Have you seen the conditions in which pigs live? Knee deep in mud, one tin shack for a family of ten, single mothers trying to raise five or six little ones, constant harassment by border collies – how can you see all this and still believe that swine flu is caused by pigs?
“It is not pigs. It is poverty,” he said.
Meanwhile Jacob Zuma’s supporters have reacted with outrage to a report by the World Health Organisation that the swine flu may be a lethal hybrid of avian, human and swine flu, and have condemned “unholy sexual acts” between barnyard animals, equating them to “the depraved acts of DA-voting girly-men”.
In 2007 Zuma was widely quoted as saying that he would “knock out” any ungqingili – a derogatory Zulu term for a homosexual – who stood in front of him.
At the time he did not clarify what he would do to homosexuals who stood next to him or behind him, but it was understood that he would knock them out as well, possibly with a roundhouse kick, either to the face or shin, depending on how high he could raise his leg.
This morning Zuma’s spokesman, Footstool Vilakazi, said that many Zuma supporters had subsequently softened their views on gays, and would now shake their hands as long as they could have a shower immediately afterwards. However, he said, Zuma would not tolerate “unholy sexual acts” between animals that threatened the world.
“Msholozi has apologized for his previous comments about the ungqingili, mainly because he wants them to decorate the Presidency and they are such drama queens, it is so easy to make them cry, and he doesn’t want their little girly-man tears staining his new leather couches,” he explained.
“But now at this time of crisis we must categorically state that if a chicken or a pig ever tried to make sexual advances on him, he would knock them both out.”
He said that Zuma had only once seen a chicken fornicating with a pig and it had made a “deep impact”.
“On Msholozi,” he added. “The chicken also made a deep impact on the pig, but mostly the impact was on Msholozi.
“Psychologically speaking, I mean. They never touched him. If they had he would have knocked them out.”
