This week South Africans let out a collective groan as we were again confronted by the spawn of ANC misrule, a catastrophic stage four failure of capacity and professionalism that is killing our economy and driving our morale into the mud. Yes, Fikile Mbalula was back in the news.
Whenever we face a fresh outbreak of public Mbalulism, many of us ask how it is that he is still employed, let alone a cabinet minister.
One answer I hear quite often is that he is in government to act as a kind of lightning rod for public attention.
Mbalula, the theory goes, has an unofficial mandate to be a buffoon. Those who are impressed by such antics, such as four-year-olds and die-hard ANC voters, will rally around him. More importantly, those who are embarrassed or outraged will vent most of their spleen on him, leaving his more subtle and less needy colleagues to go about their sinister work in the shadows.
Of course, Mbalula wasn’t appointed to Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet because he is a clown. He was appointed because he’s a clown who’s fiercely loyal to the president. His title may be minister of transport, something he’s supremely unqualified to do and is clearly hopeless at, but his actual job is to vote for Ramaphosa at ANC conferences, come hell, high water, load-shedding, Digital Vibes, grovelling loyalty to violent tyrants or economic collapse.
Still, I understand why people say he’s a walking smokescreen because I saw it in action this week.
At a press conference in Tshwane on Monday, Newzroom Afrika journalist Ziyanda Ngcobo asked Mbalula why, at the weekend, he tweeted that he had “just landed in Ukraine” when he clearly hadn’t.
Huffing and puffing like a B-grade Boris Johnson impersonator, Mbalula refused to answer the question, accusing Ngcobo of being “disruptive”. When she posted video of the exchange on Twitter, he lashed out, tweeting: “You want to be famous at my expense. Do your work and stop chasing shadows.”
Venezuela is a broken, corrupt, violent, deeply anti-democratic wreck, which means it’s probably got a better railway network than SA. It is utterly disgraceful that our government has any relations with that country, let alone good ones. But thanks to the 'Fikile Mbalula Show', almost nobody cares.
It was a wonderfully clear glimpse into that cramped, sparsely furnished studio apartment we hesitantly refer to as Mbalula’s mind. To him, a journalist’s job is to write down or broadcast his statements about driver’s licences. Anyone who asks him about anything else, such as why he would use his official ministerial Twitter handle to falsely claim to have landed in Ukraine, is simply looking for attention.
But, I would argue, it did the job. His original tweet and its boorish, belligerent, ignorant reply earned him heaps of scorn, and yet, I think, it planted a seed of doubt — or at least a seed of a kind of choking mental weed — among many Twitter followers about his and his government’s position on the invasion of Ukraine. After all, a South African cabinet minister lying about arriving there sends a profoundly different message than one lying about arriving in Russia.
It was on Wednesday, however, that I saw Mbalula’s value more clearly, when he tweeted that he was (and the screaming caps are all his own) “MEETING WITH THE MINISTER OF TRANSPORT OF THE BOLIVIAN REPUBLIC OF VENEZUELA” online.
What he meant, of course, was that Venezuela is a “Bolivarian” republic, of which there are six in South and Central America, and had it come from anyone else, it might have gone unchallenged. But after the previous day’s performance it was too good to let go and Mbalula’s critics piled in, suggesting he, rather than Ngcobo, needed to pay more attention to his work.
Within seconds his defenders were arriving too, many of them failing to recognise the typo for themselves, but nonetheless incensed that someone should say something nasty about their Clown Prince, even if they didn’t really understand what it was.
And then something genuinely startling happened: Mbalula deleted his tweet and politely thanked people for pointing out his error.
Why? Because he’d done his job. Twitter was fighting over a typo and nobody was asking the only question that mattered: why would anyone who claims to be a democrat discuss anything with a Venezuelan cabinet minister unless it is to ask them when they plan to stop torturing and jailing political opponents?
Venezuela is a broken, corrupt, violent, deeply anti-democratic wreck, which means it’s probably got a better railway network than SA. It is utterly disgraceful that our government has any relations with that country, let alone good ones.
But thanks to the Fikile Mbalula Show, almost nobody cares.
Job done.
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