TOM EATON: It all looked rosy for FF+ until Peter Marais went off script
Extract
It was all going so well for the Freedom Front Plus (FF+). They hadn’t seen so many journalists since the 1990s — easily four or five, gathered for the big reveal.
And they weren’t only there for the cookies like last time. They were writing things down! Actual words, not just the usual doodles of swastikas and penises and Pieter Groenewald being caught under a combine harvester. But then Peter Marais said what he said, and now everything was sad.
When dawn had broken over the FF+ headquarters on Tuesday, casting its gentle glow across the Andries Treurnicht Memorial Bowls Lawn and gleaming off the statue of Constand Viljoen riding a screaming angel with napalm under its wings towards fleeing MK cadres, everything had seemed possible. Because Tuesday would be the day the FF+ unveiled the secret weapon that would win them the Western Cape. The search for a strong candidate in the province had been tough. They knew they needed a coloured person to woo disgruntled DA voters, but the only coloured person they knew was Meisie Adonis — no, wait, was it Adonis or September? Jacobs? No, it was Adonis. No! April! Meisie April! But she had been working for them for 40 years, and if she went to Cape Town, who would make their tea? Complicating the search even more was the fact that the new premier candidate had to be called Pieter. After the retirement of Viljoen — or “Generaal Pappie” as they called him at meetings — Pieter Mulder had ...
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