TOM EATON | Mbalula keeps achieving new levels of incompetence ... let’s see how this pans out

Today, Fikile Mbalula has exactly three weeks until he has to deliver his plan for stopping Eastern Cape taxi mafias from attacking Intercape buses, and I almost feel sorry for him.

First, imagine his confusion around what the deadline actually means.

When the Makhanda high court told him to hand his master plan over by October 28, many media reported that this was “20 days” away.

Those, however, were working days, which, in the ANC, means three hours on a Thursday morning, depending on whether your supervisor has come in for his two-hour working week. How is anyone supposed to accomplish anything in 60 hours of gentle snoozing spread across five months? No, it’s completely out of the question.

Second, it will have taken him this week just to have the outcome of the court case explained to him. This, after all, is the man who is now proudly claiming as a win the process of slowly and cautiously reopening a handful of railway lines in SA. In other words, at full capacity, Mbalula is just capable of rolling out a 185-year-old technology.

I remember how well rewarded he [Mbalula] was for his country-wrecking loyalty, becoming a bad sports minister and a worse police minister.

Third, there’s the worry that rolling out said technology will further piss off the taxi mafias at the very moment he needs to go and pretend to strong-arm them into submission. Just last month we heard that passenger rail journeys have fallen from 44.9-million in 2012 to just over 1-million this year. Many millions of those journeys have been taken over by taxi bosses, and the last thing they want is for Mbalula to drag our trains back from the brink of total extinction and give commuters a cheaper, and infinitely safer, alternative.

Last but not least, he must be struggling with the injustice of having to try (and inevitably fail) to fix problems created by other transport ministers who are happily spending their pensions.

As I said, I almost feel sorry for the guy.

But I then remember his mainstreaming of belligerent mediocrity as ANC Youth League president, issuing one idiotic, pompous press release after another.

I remember how ardently he campaigned for Jacob Zuma, supporting him at his rape trial and denouncing his critics, and I remember how well rewarded he was for his country-wrecking loyalty, becoming a bad sports minister and a worse police minister.

I remember how, when he saw the writing on the wall for Zuma, he distanced himself from the man he helped inflict on us, jumping ship early so he could keep earning that vast, utterly unjustifiable salary and pension.

I remember all the ways in which Mbalula has championed dysfunction, arrogant incompetence, murderously destructive cadre deployment and the hollowing-out of the state.

And then I think: you’ve made your bed. Now go lie in it.