Film Image #98

14 May 2025

'Sugar, what flavour do you want to be?' That line came to me about fifteen minutes into this contemplation session. I had a whole range of thoughts before it, but this one felt different—as if it arrived, uninvited. It wasn’t part of the mental trajectory I had been on. It disrupted my control over my thinking, a foreign insertion.

Before that, I was thinking about Magnus Heystek and his YouTube video on BizNews, where he discusses how to protect one’s wealth from the government. The ANC, he argues, has sticky fingers—like Spider-Man, but for cash. And oh, how they seem to enjoy taking money from white taxpayers.

Until they properly address the findings of the Zondo Commission, I can’t bring myself to trust them. We already have a well-funded public health sector, but instead of addressing the entrenched corruption or trimming the bloated administration, the proposal is to create a new slush fund—and call it the NHI.

There’s a troubling trend where voters are promised that “the government will pay,” when in truth, it’s the taxpayers footing the bill. And still, one must wait four to eight hours at a public clinic. At the Eastlynne clinic, you even get to listen to a faulty smoke alarm while you wait—one that’s been beeping for years. The contractor hired to fix it, supposedly under a transformation initiative, never got around to it. Perhaps he was more concerned about scratching his Rolex.

Meanwhile, the figures in this painting—sitting in their secret lair, somewhere in the desert behind a waterfall—sip their Coca-Cola while spirits cavort in the digital snow around them.