<strong>The original version</strong>
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well-fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold. The moral of the story: ‘Take responsibility for yourself’. (Aesop)
<strong>The South African version</strong>
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his anthill and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well-fed while he is cold and starving.
SABC, SKY, CNN, M-Net, BBC, and Carte Blanche show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to images of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.
The country is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, in a country of such wealth? Kermit the Frog appears on Jerry Springer with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green.
The ruling party’s youth league stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s home and the news stations film the group singing We Shall Overcome. The President condemns the ant and blames Apartheid, Jan van Riebeek, and the British Empire for the grasshopper’s plight.
The far left exclaims in a TV interview that the ant has become rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for a tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share. The government drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Ant Act retroactive to the start of summer. The ant is fined for not hiring enough previously disadvantaged bugs (BBE) and because he has nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his anthill is confiscated under the Government Land Repo Act and given to the grasshopper.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government anthill he is in falls apart because the grasshopper doesn’t know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared to Australia, never to be seen again. The grasshopper is found dead from too much of the good life, and the anthill, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of Nigerian spiders who take control of, and terrorize the once prosperous and peaceful neighbourhood.
The entire nation collapses and the President tells the UN that the world should be ashamed of itself for letting the situation deteriorate like this. The Chinese Horseshoe Bats offer to step in and ‘help’ recolonize the land.
Meanwhile a lone voice from across the sea, tries to convince everyone that it is easy being green.
The moral of the story: ‘Be careful who you vote for’. (Said an unknown ant)