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Opinionista

It’s Good to be the Queen

Deep Fried Man is a musical comedian. No, seriously. That's what he does full-time, for a living. He gets on stage and sings funny songs about a variety of things, but mainly South Africa, sex and social media. Deep Fried Man is as surprised as you that being a musical comedian is something that can be done as a career. Sometimes Deep Fried Man wins awards, like Best Newcomer at the 2011 Comics Choice Awards or a Standard Bank Ovation Award for his debut one-man show Deeply Fried. Sometimes he goes viral on YouTube, like with An Idiot's Guide to Singing the South African National Anthem, a collaboration with fellow comedian Gareth Woods. Sometimes he spends every waking minute on Twitter (Follow him @DeepFriedMan). He is also a writer, currently for The Daily Maverick, which you probably realised since that's where you're reading his bio, and for Meme Burn. He apologises in advance for all the people he's going to offend.

Queen Elizabeth is the original gangster - a woman so adept at pulling the wool of the public's eyes that she's managed to get away with 60 years of, well, waving at people. But at least her hats are still pretty good, writes DEEP FRIED MAN.

Forget our corrupt politicians, our tenderpreneurs and our Zulu kings – Queen Elizabeth is the OG.*

Though it has to be said that we have made huge strides towards becoming a nation where our leaders plunder and steal on a level that we can truly be proud of, the efforts of our powers that be pale in comparison to the incredible levels of sheer, brilliant corruption perpetrated by the British royal family and its figurehead, the Queen of England (I refer to Elizabeth ll, not Elton John).

The Queen’s jubilee will cost British taxpayers an estimated one billion pounds. Just to do the conversion quickly in my head, that amounts to about a billion trillion willion rand. If the Queen were South African, black and in a position of power, she would be instantly vilified in the media.

But just because she’s white, and the queen of England, and has great taste in hats, they instead throw her a massive concert. That said, it is a concert in which she is forced to watch Cliff Richard perform, so it’s not like she has gone unpunished.

Our own leader, Msholozi, may have indulged in the occasional bit of racketeering as a hobby, but compared to Queen Elizabeth he’s a petty purse snatcher. She walks around drenched in diamonds that her flunkies helped themselves to over hundreds of years in Africa. She is the head of a nation that has stolen entire countries. Sure, Zuma has occasionally been accused of nepotism, like that time he helped  Khulubuse Zuma get his foot in the door (this backfired because the door wasn’t big enough to fit his foot), but the British Royal family takes nepotism to the next level. Consider that a crazed eccentric who collects matchboxes, dresses like Napoleon and thinks carrots scream when you pick them is next in line to be king. If we want to compete with the UK when it comes to corruption we are really going to have to up our game.

The Queen is a symbol of just how gangsta the British royals are. She has swag. She may not use the term bling but she was bling before Jay-Z sucked on his first gold-plated dummy. This is a woman who has never had to work a day in her life, has enough valuable jewellery to pay lobola on every single one of King Mswati’s wives and still has enough money to buy Turkey (as well as Greece, which they’d throw in for free) and send Kenny Kunene a bottle of single malt whiskey every day for the next millennium.

But what about the valuable work she does for society? She waves at people!  Granted, she has to do this constantly. I bet her hands hurt. And I’m sure it must be tiring opening boat shows, attending banquets and making gruelling, three-minute speeches. But the level of wealth she has amassed for her waving does help put our own big spenders into perspective. It’s enough to make you send William Mbatha a bottle of Blue Label out of sympathy.

I have to imagine that after another hard day of waving is done, when she returns home to her castle, she locks the diamond-encrusted door of one of her 332 bedrooms and laughs, extremely loudly and for a very long time, at the fact that the citizens of Great Britain are still letting her get away with it. If I was in her position, that would be exactly what I would do. DM

* OG = Original Gangster (if you thought it stood for Old Girl, Own Goal or Official Gazette, you need to listen to more hip-hop)

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