When Patricia De Lille appeared before the public works oversight committee this week to explain why her border fence is seven cobwebs held together with spit and gullible GOOD voters, she found both her competence and integrity under fire. But what nobody mentioned – and which I’d like to celebrate for a moment – is how much courage it took for her to stand up there in the first place.
A lot has been written about De Lille’s fence: how it made public works’ dismal efforts at Nkandla look like the Palace of Versailles; how those 40km of wire along our border with Zimbabwe cost R37m; how costs were inflated by R14m; how said wire was probably an effective barrier against some migrants, as long as those migrants were very old, very defeatist goats who’d just realised that they preferred life on the Zimbabwe side of the fence.
What hasn’t been written about, however, is what we saw this week: De Lille’s almost supernatural ability to speak about this mind-boggling incompetence from her and her department without sounding the least bit chagrined or apologetic.
To try to understand this extraordinary skill of hers, I imagined how I would react to a similar fiasco in my professional life.
I imagined myself back in 2013, being hired by this very publication, when, like De Lille, I found myself called up into a job with a higher profile than I’d had before.
If these questions had been e-mailed to me, I would, obviously, have deleted them before changing my name and moving to eSwatini to become the biographer of the king’s second-favourite pug.
And then I imagined, just a week or two into that job, submitting a column to my editor. Not a typed document, attached to an e-mail, but rather a fax of a single sheet of unlined paper, across which I had written, by hand, in chunky fish paste: “hello everbode hear is my colom i hope u lik it the end.”
Now, if I’d sent that, I would have expected to be asked some questions, namely:
1. Are you okay or is there someone we need to call?
2. Are you high?
3. If you are okay, and not high, are you aware that you are no longer employed by this company as a columnist?
If these questions had been e-mailed to me, I would, obviously, have deleted them before changing my name and moving to eSwatini to become the biographer of the king’s second-favourite pug.
But if, like De Lille, I had been forced to answer them in person, and worse, in public, I think I might very possibly have pretended to be dead, slumping over the table or subsiding down onto the floor until everyone lost interest and shuffled out. God knows, I could never, ever, have looked anyone in the eye and tried to provide an analysis of how I was so mind-bogglingly shit at my job.
Because this is SA, the odds of De Lille doing the right thing and resigning are about the same as her fence stopping anything. But the oversight hearings did produce one piece of good news.
According to defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula the entire notion of a border fence should now be ditched.
“The whole of the fence has not worked and probably will not work,” she told MPs. “It doesn’t matter the quality of the fence we put up.”
Instead, she explained, the SANDF must “begin to use drones and rely more on technology”.
She is absolutely right. But can we ask, in the interests of accountability and cost-effectiveness, that these future drones be commissioned by the SANDF and not the ministry of public works?
Because after De Lille’s fiasco, I can’t help feeling that I already know how that scenario might play out: after a flurry of declarations about new brooms sweeping clean, someone’s niece’s husband’s catering business will be awarded a R20m contract to supply 10 drones, and 14 years later, at a cost of R200bn, said drones will finally be revealed as a Nokia cellphone duct-taped to a weather balloon.
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