E-Revolution, E-Fficiency And E-Friends
Thulaganyo Jankie | Monday September 7, 2020 13:45
We now live in a world that is so advanced that everything worth its weight in gold is preceded by the letter E. E-tv, ewallet, ecommerce, e-arguments, e-cars.
We do hope one day we will get e-fficiency. I pray for e-fficiency. All Africans residing in this beautiful country are praying for e-fficiency. At the transport department. At Princess Marina Hospital. At the Land Board.
The latter can use a huge dose of e-fficiency. With e-fficiency the citizenry could apply for a piece of land and get it after a few months. In fact the letter to inform you of your success in being allocated a piece of land is usually jumbled up with the creditors’ letters just after your funeral. Which is a good 20 years! That application and waiting list outlive a great number of the landless.
If you ever manage to get your piece of land within 10 years, you should play the lottery. Such luck is akin to the fabled Nthonyana who is rumoured to have battered a rod for a horse. Such luck must be bottled and sold internationally to increase our basket of exports.
Land Boards could benchmark at SPEDU who about five years ago and using e-fficiency that was suspiciously on steroids debunked everything about the slowness of doing things here. They advertised a vacancy, filtered applicants, short-listed candidates, interviewed them and appointed their man. All this within a space of five days! There is speed and there is SPEDU-speed. Another commodity that we could sell across borders!
The e-revolution has also blessed us with e-friends. Now these are friends that you most probably have never met. Well, not entirely though because you would have met them on Facebook. They are usually beautiful, hang out in fancy restaurants, eat healthy scrumptious food and are generally larger than life characters. That is until you meet them.
There’s a certain unwritten code. Whenever a person posts a picture of themselves even ones that should be on World’s Weirdest and Wackiest Creatures the standard responses are smothered with ‘glowing’, ‘100% hot’, ‘flame factory’ and some other flaccid adjectives that are meant to pacify the person. If you don’t believe me check out my picture here. One day, I posted same and some e-friends had the generosity to respond with the customary unsolicited ‘hot’.
Now hot has never been used to describe me before except when I was a baby and thermometers were in short supply. This is when mothers used to use the back of their hands against the infant’s brow as a thermometer. Of course this type of gadget had only two readings - hot and okay. That is the only time ‘hot’ was used against my name several times.
Efriends will post something like ‘If people do not give me any likes they shouldn’t expect any from me’ which is a common refrain on the vanity street that is Facebook. It is a kind of hostage situation and bewildered efriends have no choice but to ring out the positives.
Things are getting slightly better though and Mark has now increased the number of emojis that one can use to respond unlike before when only ‘like’ was the emoji. We can now use emojis that are less than flattering. It is now a subtle way of calling a spade a spade. For too long we have been calling spades remote control units. In a way we have been emancipated. It is something worth praising the Lord for.
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