Diogenes Fernando’s cousin is panicking. A deadly swine fever is sweeping the hill country, and his own pig farm is now threatened with extinction!
And it couldn’t have happened at a worse moment. He is currently negotiating with Diogenes to find high-risk, high-return investors for the cannabis farm he’s planning for when the government legalises growing marijuana for export.
The trouble is, the business plan depends on slashing costs by using pig-poo methane to power generators for the energy-sapping lights and hydroponics needed to make the project viable in a highly competitive global market.
But according to media reports, the ferociously contagious porcine plague has “spiralled out of control” after being spread far and wide by free-ranging wild boars. Thousands have already died amid fears of “an enormous impact on farms”.
In short, no pigs, no poo, no methane, no business.
Which is also a problem for Diogenes himself, who took refuge on the farm after a rancorous, no-holds-barred falling out with The Man over their illicit and now-defunct CatAstrophe asset-relocation fund.
So hopes of staging a comeback with this cannabis joint venture are now fading fast. To make matters worse, unbeknownst to the cousin, with the help of the banker buddy he has already signed up three investors, and taken their money.
And these are not your average law-abiding venture capitalists who take such setbacks in their stride, but serious black-money movers and shakers who no-one in their right mind would want to cross…
To ward off disaster, the obvious first line of defence would be armed guards on the boundary with orders to shoot on sight anything with four legs, as well as crows and other scavengers that might be spreading the disease.
But that would almost certainly trigger uproar amongst liberal metropolitan political and media elites, tourism bosses, UNWTO, UNCAHP, the WWF, the IMF, etc etc etc—and which would likely scupper the object of the exercise.
What to do..?
Meanwhile, The Man’s bid to sneak into parliament through the back door, ie, the National List, is proceeding apace. After a month of soundings among the also-ran political parties, he has come up with a cunning plan.
Rather than try to whitewash his murky reputation as a ruthless outlaw ‘entrepreneur’, he will capitalise on it by portraying himself as a swashbuckling poacher turned gamekeeper determined to repent and mend his ways in the national interest.
He will hint that after all those years dealing with shady businessmen and their tame politicians, he knows where misbegotten loot is stashed and—figuratively speaking, of course—where the bodies are buried.
So it will be an attractive proposition for said also-rans seeking to boost their party’s standing amongst a fractious and rebellious electorate. Properly spun, it would even serve as a clarion call for ‘system change’. The redeemed sinner comes clean! An epiphany! Hallelujah!
The problem is that many, if not most, of those same shady businessmen and tame politicians are former CatAstrophe clients with a lot to lose. Which means there could well be serious, not to say life-threatening, repercussions.
But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, he thinks, recalling the words of famed German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously!” Hmm…