EDITORIAL | Some issues are more important than your attention-seeking, Fikile

There’s no doubt that transport minister Fikile Mbalula likes the limelight. The man who refers to himself as “MR FIX” (in all caps, of course) on Twitter is certainly not shy of the public eye — to the point that, not long ago, he called himself “Mr Fearfokkol” to his about 2.7-million Twitter followers.

This is the same man who, during his stint as sports minister, labelled the Bafana Bafana team a “bunch of losers” back in 2014. That’s one way to build up a team’s confidence ...

This is a minister who, as recently as Monday morning, used a picture of himself as a meme to ask another Twitter user why he had used him as a meme. It beggars belief.

In fact, looking at Mbalula’s Twitter feed, it would be difficult to know for sure that he is a senior member of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet and an influential person in the ruling ANC. The lines between personal and professional aren’t just blurred, they’re nonexistent.

This all came to a head at the weekend, when Mbalula, inexplicably, posted one of the most unnecessary tweets imaginable amid the devastating Russia-Ukraine war.

“Just landed in Ukraine,” he wrote, mere moments after retweeting a post from the Russian Embassy in SA, in which it said it had received letters of support from South Africans who were standing with it in “fighting Nazism in Ukraine”.

Was he actually in Ukraine, and why did he post that particular tweet? Perhaps expectedly, he wouldn’t answer when he was probed at an official government event on Monday morning.

“No, no, no, I’m not going to talk about that,” he said in response to Newzroom Afrika journalist Ziyanda Ngcobo, even as she pressed him on whether he was actually in the eastern European country.

When Ngcobo asked him whether he was trivialising the unfolding crisis, he would only say: “I did not trivialise anything and I won’t comment on that.”

He later called the question “disruptive”.

Ngocbo summed up this, frankly, nonsensical approach in a subsequent tweet: “@MbalulaFikile thinks I’m ‘disruptive’ for probing him as a publicly elected official about a tweet HE posted on a public platform, creating confusion and considerably insensitive to what’s happening with the #RussiaUkraineConflict.”

Whether it’s himself or someone tweeting on his behalf, Mbalula had a chance to explain himself, and simply failed to do so.

A minister who has failed to resolve problems in his own department has now weighed in on an international crisis unprovoked - and in an utterly useless manner, to boot.

When one factors in the complexities of the situation, it’s clear that — for whatever reason he did it — Mbalula was reckless in sending it out.

That it came in the context of the SA government’s at-odds messages over the conflict makes it even more reckless. The fact that he, as minister of transport, has — to use the name he once called himself — “fokkol” to do with the international relations and cooperation ministry makes it even more reckless.

It was a childish, irresponsible tweet that further muddied the waters of SA diplomacy over a war that has the potential to cause hardship in his own country, depending on just how much food and fuel prices end up spiralling.

As many South Africans quickly noted, Mbalula’s performance in his own portfolio is questionable. Prasa is a mess, potholes are commonplace, the annual road death toll is unacceptably high, the AATRO Act (whatever South Africans might think of it) missed yet another deadline, and he has promised repeatedly that we’d have an answer on E-tolls that, to date, we just do not have.

Whether he inherited the problems or not is inconsequential. What matters is that a minister who has failed to resolve them adequately has now weighed in on an international crisis unprovoked — and in an utterly useless manner, to boot.

Mbalula loves attention. Remember when he tried to get Beyoncé to perform at the SA Sports Awards? More and more, it looks like he’s using his considerable Twitter following to get the attention he seemingly so desperately craves.

Mbalula needs to grow up — on Twitter at least — and realise that some things just don’t warrant his (often nonsensical) brand of “razzmatazz”. If he doesn’t, his boss, Ramaphosa, needs to call him to order.