If Donald Trump or Boris Johnson had suggested that homeless people in SA should be shot with rubber bullets if they tried to build homes on railway lines, Cyril Ramaphosa, the whole of the ANC and its alliance partners, the SA Human Rights Commission, every front page of every newspaper in the land and all of Twitter would have denounced them as fascist monsters who should be charged with hate speech.
When Fikile Mbalula does it, well, that’s different.
Earlier this week, the transport minister on whose watch all trains have completely ceased to function in the Eastern Cape was one province over, taking credit for the partial reopening of Cape Town’s Central line and handing out advice on how to keep the rails clear.
As SA’s transport infrastructure has been left to rot by the ANC — or actively cut up for scrap — homeless people have often built over the ruins. Even in Cape Town’s DA-run, relatively well-serviced industrial suburb of Montagu Gardens, I recently saw a temporary dwelling sprawled across a discontinued MyCiTi bus lane.
This is obviously a complex, multilayered problem requiring a complex, multilayered solution involving economics, politics, history, social justice and perhaps even psychology.
For the supremely non-complex, single-layered Mbalula, however, the solution is simple.
“I don’t want to say it,” Mbalula said, “but I am saying to SAPS, and to everybody, shoot, but not to kill, but rubber bullets, anyone who puts up a shack must be dealt with.”
He didn’t ‘want to say it’, of course, because he’s a coward. But he did say it because he’s completely out his depth professionally, emotionally and intellectually.
He didn’t “want to say it”, of course, because he’s a coward. But he did say it because he’s completely out his depth professionally, emotionally and intellectually. This, after all, is a man who believes the job of a cabinet minister is to urge “everybody” to wound shack dwellers rather than to try to create an economy in which people don’t have to live in shacks.
A lot of people are disgusted by Mbalula, but I get it. Thinking is hard, man. It’s really, really hard, especially when you never learnt to do it and haven’t had any practice over the years, and now all you’ve got in your head are Beyoncé lyrics and dust mites.
No, sometimes all a comrade can do is let his jaw fall open, his eyes glaze over, and allow that sweet, sweet stupid to dribble out of his mouth and pool around his pointy shoes.
Thank God for cadre deployment. In the real world, a politician who incited extrajudicial violence against the poor would be pilloried. A relatively lowly and relentlessly useless one like Mbalula might even be demoted or fired.
Unlike the people he wants “everybody” to shoot, however, Mbalula is bulletproof.
Partly that’s because he’s worked so hard at convincing the country that he’s a buffoon. You can be pure political trash, but as long as you keep telling everyone that you’re funny, and that your violent, reactionary rhetoric might have been a joke, most people will shrug and move on, because most people are too tired to pay a lot of attention to crude, attention-seeking lumps.
Mostly, however, Mbalula knows he can talk about shooting poor people because Ramaphosa needs him.
He understands how the great pyramid is arranged; this ghastly geometry that explains why the trains don’t run and why so much is broken: faction above party; party above government; government above the rich; the rich above the middle class; the middle class above the working class.
And then, at last the shack dwellers, to be threatened by this rich, pompous little man, boasting about a functioning railway line as if it’s 1830 and not 2022.
2024 can’t come soon enough.
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