THE first time President Jacob Zuma gave us a cabinet reshuffle I nearly died of joy. When he had a second, I ran around the block just to sweat off my excitement. Now he has had a third and I am happy, but I am also beginning to wonder.

THE first time President Jacob Zuma gave us a cabinet reshuffle I nearly died of joy. When he had a second, I ran around the block just to sweat off my excitement. Now he has had a third and I am happy, but I am also beginning to wonder.

I wonder if his appointments are really that effective; I wonder if it is not really all about him and his chances of survival in Mangaung.

I t is extremely encouraging that the word "fired" is now a part of our political vocabulary. U nder President Thabo Mbeki you had to die first before you could be fired for incompetence. Half the cabinet was fast asleep, or on tranquillisers. The only person ever fired by Mbeki in nine years was Zuma himself, and it was not for his incompetence, which he displayed in abundance.

Then along came Zuma. Among his first scalps was the powerful former SA National Defence Force chief Siphiwe Nyanda, who got the boot from the Communications Ministry. Others, like the stupendously corrupt and entitled Sicelo Shiceka, followed in the second reshuffle. This was a breath, no, a tsunami, of fresh air indeed.

So last Monday Zuma went to the ANC's special national executive committee and, rightly, saw off the pack that wanted to see Julius Malema returned to the presidency of the ANC Youth League. The next day he had a cabinet reshuffle and announced the firing of Bheki Cele, the voluble former national police commissioner, and his replacement by business executive Riah Phiyega.

One of the more curious aspects of this redeployment and the main cabinet reshuffle is that lessons seem not to have been learned by Zuma and his advisers. Phiyega is, I am sure, a capable and much-loved business leader. Her problem is that, for all her talents, she is unlikely to succeed in her job.

Jackie Selebi can tell her a thing or two about being parachuted cold into a job he had absolutely no clue about. Because of his lack of experience, expertise or knowledge of the terrain, he trusted anyone who seemed to have a nice word to say to him or claimed to know somebody who knew somebody who could crack a big crime syndicate.

So he fell in with shysters, murderers and conmen. Before you could say "hands up" he was in jail.

Bheki Cele was a bit better. He came with a political understanding of the safety and security terrain from his tenure in the KwaZulu-Natal's transport, safety and security portfolio. The former teacher is no policeman and it showed. He remained a politician, given to grandiose statements that had no basis in law. Saying the police should shoot to kill - even when you sugar-coat it in the way Cele and others did, does not pass the muster of our constitution.

Phiyega will follow the same path, I fear. Not that she is not an intelligent woman. She is a political appointment, and there are already two others in the job. Maggie Sotyu, the deputy police minister, has already proved her allegiance to Zuma by leading the pack that killed off the Scorpions. Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa is mired in the politics of Richard Mdluli and others. They will stick their hands all over Phiyega's job. She won't be able to move without placing a call to the Union Buildings.

That will be the end of her. The independence shown by Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, the acting national police commissioner, will not belong to her. Murder, rape, hijackings and fraud will remain a part of our vocabulary.

What of the new appointees to Zuma's cabinet? The elevation to the deputy ministership of higher education of the ANC Youth League national executive committee member Mduduzi Manana is a blatant "thank you" for his robust defence of Zuma and fight against expelled ANCYL leader Julius Malema. He should find happiness with fierce Zuma loyalist Blade Nzimande in the ministry.

Both S'bu Ndebele and Jeremy Cronin were proving to be disasters at the transport ministry. Ndebele seemed merely to want to deflect blame as far from himself as possible on the e-tolls issue, whereas Cronin - as a leader of the SA Communist Party - knows in his heart of hearts that his personal and political support of the tolling of Gauteng highways is anti-worker and anti-poor.

So, in essence, Zuma's entire exercise this week was a bit of tinkering here and there, but nothing that signifies progress of any sort.

We have moved not an inch forward in making South Africa a better country despite the reams of column centimetres we have spent on this reshuffle.