The recent and quite abrupt announcement that the seat of the High Court will shift to Bhisho from
Grahamstown caught many residents off-guard.
Together with Rhodes, the National Arts Festival and several elite private schools, the High Court is our claim to fame.
The recent and quite abrupt announcement that the seat of the High Court will shift to Bhisho from
Grahamstown caught many residents off-guard.
Together with Rhodes, the National Arts Festival and several elite private schools, the High Court is our claim to fame.
They collectively allow the city to punch way above its weight class. Quickly, what is Port Elizabeth really famous for? East London? Queenstown? Graaff- Reinet? Fort Beaufort? Port Alfred? King William’s Town? Cradock? Humansdorp? Well?
The point is, without any factories, farmland, beaches, a seat of government, or any seriously famous sons and daughters, Grahamstown has always managed to get noticed.
The migration to Bhisho appears to be the first shot across the bow in the realignment of the pecking order in the Eastern Cape. You want to know whom I blame for all this? Julius Malema.
Yes I said it! If only Juju was born in Grahamstown, we’d have home court advantage (so to speak) and none of this nonsense would come to pass.
Think about it: he is not even 30, but the actions of the president of the ANC Youth League strikes real fear in grown men and women.
Never mind the ridicule he has been subjected to, he is a callous, foul-mouthed bigot with little education.
Still, he took the decisive 2008 ANC Delegates Conference to his home town of Polokwane. Ominously Juju declared that year that: “We will have Mbeki removed. We don’t fight to lose.
He is going. It doesn’t matter who said what, Mbeki won’t be president when we go to the election.” Well, Thabo (who was no slouch either) met his Waterloo and eventual dismissal as State President at Polokwane.
Since then, Juju has amassed palatial homes, mining rights, expensive European cars, construction companies and Breitling watches, all the while taking no prisoners in his verbal assaults at real and imagined enemies.
“A racist little girl,” Juju called DA leader Helen Zille last year; “Go out bastard, bloody agent!” he shouted at BBC journalist Jonah Fisher as he chased him from a press conference; “Let the minister use that fake accent to address our problems!”
he said once of well-spoken and then Education Minister Naledi Pandor. Imagine what choice words a Grahamstown-born Juju would have for those behind the High Court’s imminent relocation.
Make no mistake, this is all politics. Bhisho might be a barren little warren whose only claim to fame is hosting the Eastern Cape government; but it has friends in high places.
It has mini Jujus pulling strings behind the scene at Luthuli House. And for better or worse, that building is the centre of the South African universe today. Juju is very near the top of the food chain.
Grahamstown would not lose this fight if Juju was a home-boy. Instead? Somewhere in Bhisho, someone is singing in the shower: wake up and smell the coffee.
• Sim believes in Grahamstown. But he’s not naïve.
