Almost exactly 199 years ago, Percy Bysshe Shelley penned these immortal words:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
It was a reflection on the life of the Egyptian Pharoah, Ramesses II, of which Shelley intoned:
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A guy flies from Johannesburg to Hong Kong to get his suits bespoke tailored there because he’s crunched the numbers and has worked out that it would actually be significantly cheaper to do so than buying from the Hugo Boss store in Sandton City.
So he stops by to pick up the finished product and is impressed by the impeccable sartorial elegance. He tries to strike a pose in front of the full-length mirror, and his hands instead slip down the sides of his trousers. He turns to the tailor bewildered.
In the build-up to the 2014 national elections, Advocate Dali Mpofu, representing the then newly-formed Economic Freedom Fighters, was a guest on my radio station’s weekly current affairs show. We chatted briefly in the parking lot thereafter, and I posed the question: “If you end up doing well and driving the ANC below 50 percent in some areas, would you consider going into coalition with them?”
“Never,” he said quite decisively, indicating that he thought that would be the kiss of death for the new party.