Good news, ye trodden under masses of South Africa! Anonymous has finally taken note of your plight and you can expect deliverance from your daily misery as soon as before the Rugby World Cup ends! So rise up and conquer, People! What are you waiting for?

What do you mean, what the flying fuck am I talking about?

Haven’t you seen the Youtube video that Anonymous posted on March 18?

So there! Revolution is upon us!

I trust you know who Anonymous are, right? Or rather, who they aren’t. Because we don’t exactly know who Anonymous is (Hence: Anonymous. Bloody clever, right?). They are black and they are white. They are legion. They are a horribly eschewed metaphor.

Basically, they are a bunch of pasty-faced teenagers sitting in mum’s basement and amusing themselves by hacking into Gawker’s website. They recently decided that they like pasty-faced-geek-in-chief Julian Assange, and have committed various felonies in support of him. Remember how they brought peace and prosperity to America when they launched a DDOS attack on Paypal’s site? They watched V for Vendetta and thought that it was the coolest thing they’d ever seen. They’re probably that guy wandering around the mall in a steampunk outfit.

Anyway, back to more pressing matters. So, what are we conquering exactly? The iffy thing about revolts is that there has to be someone we’re all revolting against. It has to be someone we universally hate, who has screwed us all over and who has little or no support among the people. Take the Cuban revolution of 1959. Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and the others were popularly supported because everyone hated the incumbent dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar. Everyone hated Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime, hence his quick exit from the country in earlier this year. Same thing in Egypt.

But as the civil war in Libya shows, if at least a portion of the people like Brother Leader Muammar Gaddafi, then revolution becomes civil war. So, oops, no revolution in South Africa. Too many people like the national government.

But the notion of a popular uprising tickles my inner socialist revolutionary. Actually it’s the thought of me rumbling into Pretoria at the head of an armoured column, doffing my guerrilla cap to the adoring masses while lazily puffing on a Romeo y Julieta. So what would need to happen for South Africa to become ripe for a revolution?

The problem, quite simply, is that our leaders are too good. We have it too nice in South Africa these days. We haven’t had the same calibre of unhinged despot that we so diligently produced in the apartheid years of late. We’ve tried the ANC, the DA and the IFP as parties of governance in various provinces, and they have been to varying degrees indifferent, fuddy duddy, arrogant and incompetent. They haven’t been actively malevolent. Well, there was that one instance when Mangosuthu Buthelezi was given the keys to the country for a week and he invaded Lesotho…

We need to go back to the sort of calibre of leader we had back in the apartheid era. Real loonies like DF Malan, Hendrik Verwoerd or PW Botha.

And I’ve found just the man to do it. We all hate him. And he has all the other important credentials as well. He’s served jail time for a variety of offenses, as all soon-to-be dictators must. He’s faintly well-off. He is unspeakably ugly. He has the brother in the Secret Service. And he has a ridiculously outsized ego.

Think of it, wouldn’t you rise up furiously against President for Life Brother Leader Schabir Shaik? Wouldn’t we all come together in mutual hatred against this man, pitching our tents in Nelson Mandela Square and declaring “freedom or death” while the SAPS Riot Squad hands out unholy bliksem to unarmed civilians?

Yes, if my dream of a socialist uprising is to be realised, resplendent with helicopters, the smell of napalm in the morning and a big, bushy beard, Schabir Shaik must become President of South Africa.

If this worries you, you’ll at least be comforted to know that once my revolution hits its stride, Anonymous will be persuaded to come out from behind their V masks and show themselves. If that’s not persuasive enough, I’ll make them.

[Image : TimesLIVE]