Finance minister Tito Mboweni has objected to the DA referring to state-owned enterprises as “zombies” and I am inclined to agree with him. In this instance the DA has overstepped badly and is being very unfair and unkind to zombies.
On Wednesday evening, as the DA criticised the minister’s mini-budget and made the hurtful comment in question, Mboweni struggled to hide his irritation.
“I think the DA must do their work first before they make grandstanding statements like that,” he told the press. “And I don’t take kindly [to it] referring to state-owned enterprises as ‘zombies’. They are not zombies. In fact, their [the DA] behaviour is zombie-like.”
As arguments go, “They’re not zombies, you’re a zombie” isn’t exactly Gore Vidal vs William F Buckley, but perhaps the minister was rattled by the unkindness of the DA’s comparison.
After all, it’s not zombies’ faults that they’re zombies: they were made that way, either by other zombies or a virus or a sky beam or an evil scientist. It wasn’t cynical “cadre deployment” or dysfunction or neglect or corruption that turned them.
Zombies are highly sensitive to noise, but you can scream at SOEs til you’re blue in the face and they’ll still not react.
But that’s just one of many obvious differences between zombies and SOEs.
Zombies eat only brains, whereas SOEs seem to be allergic to brains, preferring to eat pretty much everything else.
Zombies can run towards you at extreme pace, while SOEs mostly inch along at a glacial crawl, and then usually sideways or backwards.
Zombies are highly sensitive to noise, but you can scream at SOEs til you’re blue in the face and they’ll still not react.
Zombies can be stopped by removing their heads, but when you remove the head of an SOE, it simply gets a new one and the rampage continues.
Perhaps most importantly of all, zombies want to make more zombies. SOEs, on the other hand, seem entirely dedicated to reducing the number of enterprises, whether state-owned or private, in SA. (Special mention should be made of Eskom in this regard, which has done much more damage to enterprise and industry in this country than any fictional horde ever could.)
No. The DA has got this badly wrong and should offer an apology to the undead, acknowledging the extremely raw deal they’ve been handed by fate and stating plainly and unequivocally that when it comes to soulless, mindless husks lurching after their next meal, SA’s SOEs are in a league entirely of their own.
