Sentient-orange-slushy and American president, Donald Trump, has a sketchy history of hiring unqualified people to do important jobs.

His reasons for doing so are always a little left of logical. Remember that time he made Patrick Park the US ambassador to Austria? Park had only one qualification – he had seen the Sound of Music so many times that he knew the words by heart.

Yep, that’s the guy you want handling things like trade negotiations.

Now, the idiot-in-chief has nominated a Pretoria-born handbag designer as the next ambassador to SA, reports BusinessDay.

The SABC reported: “President Cyril Ramaphosa is said to be considering the nomination of South African-born, US-based luxury handbag designer, Lana Marks, to be the next US ambassador to SA.”

Marks is an alumnus of Clarendon School for Girls in East London. The school’s website says of her: “Lana was raised in East London where she attended Clarendon Girls High School. She later moved to the US and now lives and works out of Palm Beach in Florida.

“Lana Marks bags retail for between R 9 500 and R 50 000, while the iconic Cleopatra Clutch will set you back a whopping R 1-million.”

I take it back, she’s super qualified. The Pretoria chardonnay girls are going to be stoked. Here’s a look at one of her famous handbags:

Ugh, kill it with fire. How did this design come into being?

“When Marks was only three years old, her father began taking her to family building sites, where he explained the finer points of architecture and proportion, while her mother, a businesswoman and an artist, taught her to appreciate the finest European textiles and craftsmanship.”

Cool. What does this have to do with international relations? She also played tennis and studied ballet, spending years perfecting her “grand jetés and her plies”.

This, alongside her handbag brand, apparently all points to the pursuit of perfection.

“A fruitless search for a red alligator handbag to match her suit led Marks to conclude that a niche existed in the marketplace for luxury, exotic leather fashion handbags in fabulous colours.”

Well, there’s no accounting for taste. Here she is in an interview with BusinessDay in 2006:

The woman who was born Lana Bank in 1953 has a refined voice that oozes confidence. She comes across as a person of quality, as polished as her collection of handbags that offers 150 designs available in alligator, ostrich, crocodile and lizard skin.

“I went to very fine schools,” she says of Sterling Primary School and Clarendon High School in East London.

She goes on to describe how elite Palm Beach is, and how many celebrities and royals she’s interacted with, including Trump (with Marks below).

Oh, and one more thing – she has a history of breaking the law.

The couple [Marks and her husband] were convicted of breaking Bermudan immigration laws in June 1982, for hiring a South African nanny illegally, but the conviction was overturned on appeal the following year. However, the Bermudan immigration department refused to renew Neville’s work permit and the family was forced to leave the island in 1985, local newspaper reports say.

Apart from being born here, Marks’ only qualifications seem to be that she makes handbags out of a lot of our indigenous animals, and is willing to break to law to hire a South African domestic worker.

Trump is probably hoping that she will increase his standing with some of those royals and celebrities she knows so well. The artist formerly known as Kanye West, Ye, is just about his only celebrity friend right now.

Let’s hope President Ramaphosa doesn’t give in to this one. We have enough problems at the moment without adding overpriced crocodile handbags into the mix.

[source:businessday]