TOM EATON | Predicting Cyril’s reshuffle is not an exact science

Cyril Ramaphosa’s Monday evening rejig of his cabinet, less a reshuffle than a nervous prod with a stick into a clogged toilet, has been widely ridiculed as the latest failure of a failed president. But are we being too harsh?  

After all, for years we’ve been demanding that the ANC starts appointing educated and qualified people to high office, and our new minister of transport, Sindisiwe Chikunga, is definitely both those things, holding a master’s degree in nursing and diplomas in both midwifery and nursing science.  

In other words, she is used to blood and screaming, which will come in very handy should she ever accidentally start doing her job and try to wrestle SA’s roads and rail networks back from the taxi and trucking mafias.  

Of course, there’s almost no chance of this happening — Chikunga has been an MP since 2004, and therefore an integral part of the clapped-out skedonk that has dumped us into our current pothole — but still, at the very least it could be argued that, as someone who helped break our transport system, she has insider knowledge on how it might be fixed.  

Patricia de Lille, likewise, is an absolutely perfect choice as tourism minister, having already created the most welcoming border fence in SA’s history.  

Of all Ramaphosa’s floaters, she is certainly the one who most powerfully embodies the old SA tourism slogan, “Alive With Possibilities”. After all, where else could you join your fourth political party (and the second started by you), win over a microscopic 0.2% of eligible voters, immediately get made a cabinet minister by the party you pretended to oppose, fail publicly and hilariously, then walk straight into another cabinet post? If that doesn’t make you all warm and fuzzy, nothing will.  

The most excellent appointment, however, must surely be that of Zizi Kodwa, who has finally been rewarded for years of hard graft with the ministry of sports, arts and culture. 

So why is this such a perfect fit?  

The ANC merged the sports ministry with the arts and culture one in 2019, creating one neat trash can that it could roll into a political back alley and ignore.  

Well, to understand that you first need to understand the ANC’s relationship with sport, art and culture, which I would imagine fluctuates between deep suspicion, contempt and pure loathing.  

Sport, after all, requires discipline, teamwork and, most abhorrent to the ANC, competition. In sport, it’s the better team that wins, not the one with the most cadres or the unquestioning support of Thabo “Mugabe Totally Won” Mbeki. 

Art is even more repugnant, having spent centuries warning society against precisely the sort of people who now dominate the ANC. Even worse, it’s incredibly difficult to get rich from art. 

And as for culture, well, in SA, culture is history, and as everyone in the ANC knows, the moment you allow yourself to look at the party’s history, you quickly see exactly what you and your fellow NEC members are: dandruff on the shoulders of giants.  

All of which is why the ANC merged the sports ministry with the arts and culture one in 2019, creating one neat trash can that it could roll into a political back alley and ignore.  

Even better, it gave Ramaphosa a place he could park his most supremely unemployable yes-men, buying their loyalty by making them real live cabinet ministers but putting them somewhere where they could do almost no damage to anyone the ANC cares about.  

Nathi Mthethwa’s job description, we now know, was to breathe in and then breathe out, over and over again, and to nod when Ramaphosa told him to.  

Zizi Kodwa’s will be the same, and I am confident he will breathe and nod with particular skill.  

After all, this is the same man accused by the Zondo commission of having received gigantic amounts of money from dodgy businesspeople in return for getting their tenders to the front of the right queues.  

Sure, it looks shady, and yes, if you want to be hyper-critical you could argue that Kodwa’s promotion gives the lie to anything Ramaphosa might say about tackling corruption in the future.  

But I put it to you that those businesspeople believed Kodwa was the sort of classic, Zuma-era cadre who could really get things done. And who am I to disagree?