I suppose if you listened carefully and often enough to the politicians of Poland or Mexico or New Zealand you’d find a lot of what they say is incoherent, absurd or just plain lunatic. It’s in the nature of politics to attract the obsessed and the gormless.

But you’d be hard-pressed to find anything quite as stupid as the utterances of a former premier of Limpopo and former minister of both mining and public service & administration, Ngoako Ramatlhodi, interviewed on Clement Manyathela’s Face the Nation...