Was Cyril just saving up to see Trevor?

● There is a theory that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala piggy bank was merely his attempt to save enough money to buy tickets for Trevor Noah’s tour of South Africa in 2023.

True or not, the unfortunate incident has many less-well-endowed citizens baying for the reform of laws that govern the stashing of cash.

Everything is being reformed these days. There are electoral reforms, electrical reforms and educational reforms.

The word “reform” comes from the Latin reformare, meaning to change or transform. In 14th-century Old French the word changed slightly to mean “convert or restore to another and better form”. And in the 1580s, the English word “reform” had transmuted into “abandon wrongdoing or error”, or so says the Online Etymology Dictionary.

This is the same sense in which we use “reform” today, though some variations (“the criminal child was sent to a reformatory”) have become archaic.

Reform is also seen frequently in articles about music. More bands have broken up and reformed than people have examined their stools.

One of these bands is The Pixies, a headbanging outfit formed in 1992, almost immediately disbanded (there’s a pun there but I’m not going to make it) and lucratively reformed in 2003.

Other bands never unformed. Incidentally, in apartheid-era South Africa, one could occasionally go to see “international” acts at Sun City, located in the “independent” bantustan of Bophuthatswana, which provided a handy loophole for cultural-sanctions-busting performers to make some money.

One of these was Leo Sayer, who had big hair and wore a pink-and-white knitted jumper and yodelled about how much he needed us. If anyone wants to guess my age, I have a signed album from that dismal performance, but to be fair I was not yet old enough to have developed proper musical taste. Another was Barry Manilow, who sat on a barstool while bellowing out his ballads. Need I say more?

These archaeological diggings are relevant today because it seems as though South Africa, in terms of hosting top global talents, has fallen back into the way of the bantustan.

Every month (it’s probably only every few years but it seems like more) I receive a shouty notification about the band Smokie (formerly Smokey — there’s a story there but not enough space to tell it here) visiting South Africa yet again to inflict their softfolk-rock on elderly ears. (To be honest, I don’t know the background story — there might have been a copyright issue, or maybe, given that Smokey has been travelling regularly to South Africa — perhaps the country in which most of their 11 fans reside — to pay homage to their carbon footprint.)

For the uninitiated, or those not acquainted with Wikipedia, Smokie is an English rock band from Yorkshire, whose most popular hit single, Living Next Door to Alice, peaked at No 3 on the UK singles chart in 1977.

I am old enough to remember my (much) older sister and her friends bopping along to the song: “... for 24 years I’ve been living next door to Alice ...”.

By my calculations, the band members have been living next door to the hapless Alice for at least 69 years at this point in time (a phrase almost as useless as the band). I wonder if Alice is still alive?

On another, rather belated note, a band beloved of privileged 1980s teenagers with nihilistic tendencies came all the way to South Africa in November to perform its greatest hits to an audience of Zimmerframed rockers. The Waterboys, a rock band formed in Scotland in 1983, set the aloes quivering in Kirstenbosch, Cape Town, and made the dogs bark in Mark’s Park in Johannesburg.

It seems slightly odd that the members of a band formed (when they were already semi-adults) 49 years ago still employ the word “boys” in their name.

You’d think they might have changed it to Watergeezers, or Watergeysers, which waterless South Africans would be very happy to have.

The point of all this is purely to inform those who can’t afford a ticket to Trevor Noah’s performances that Smokie will be playing in these parts in December. So don’t ever say we don’t have choices.