It’s great that Fikile Mbalula has warned incompetent ANC officials that they are on notice, but one has to ask: given the existence of the Dunning-Kruger effect, how would Mbalula know what incompetence looks like?
According to Messrs Dunning and Kruger, people of limited ability, or possessing little knowledge or experience, generally don’t have the mental capacity to understand how inept they are. This leads them to overestimate themselves, or, in the case of the ANC, run for office and become cabinet ministers.
Now, I don’t know how intelligent Mbalula is. It’s possible he is extremely intelligent and has simply chosen to keep that aspect of himself private over these last many years, perhaps to blend more easily into the ANC’s NEC.
I do know, however, that Mbalula, having been first appointed to high office by Jacob Zuma, has never encountered anything even vaguely resembling competence and professionalism, and is therefore supremely unqualified to know what either of those two things look like.
Still, no politician ever got poor overestimating their own abilities, and this week Mbalula revealed to the press a clear belief that someone who has drifted for twenty years in a warm bath of consequence-free, sheltered employment can tell good from bad, and warned the bad that he’s coming for them.
“Truth be told,” Mbalula said, “some of our comrades are letting us down in a very big way. We must not camouflage that.”
I’ve been hard on Mbalula over the years but I was genuinely touched by the childlike naiveté he displayed at this moment. Because by warning the ANC not to “camouflage” anything, he was, of course, implying that he believes that ANC has been camouflaging incompetence until now. In other words, Mbalula believes that the party has been able to hide or disguise the utter awfulness of its worst people.
Is it a performance of loyalty, perhaps a slow crawl on one’s stomach across the throne room, rising only high enough to kiss the hem of Cyril Ramaphosa?
Perhaps it’s Dunning-Kruger. Perhaps he’s simply been swaddled in jobs-for-life Cloud Cuckooland for so long. Either way, we now know that Fikile Mbalula believes that we can’t see how bad he and his colleagues are at their jobs; that we can’t recognise the monstrous unprofessionalism of all the cronies and cadres parachuted into every municipality in the land; that we don’t know how to read the hundreds of headlines about the hundreds of corruption scandals.
In short, we’re dealing with someone who inhabits a reality so radically different from our own that we can’t even assume words mean the same thing to him as they mean to us.
Luckily, when Mbalula says that “those who don’t perform, their days are numbered”, we know he’s not talking about performance in terms of professionalism or competence, because, as I’ve explained, he doesn’t know what those are.
Still, it’s interesting to wonder what Mbalula is talking about when he says: “You don’t perform, you are out.” What performance is this, exactly?
Is it a performance of loyalty, perhaps a slow crawl on one’s stomach across the throne room, rising only high enough to kiss the hem of Cyril Ramaphosa?
Is it a performance of contempt for the people of this country, perhaps by printing out the latest unemployment and crime statistics, rolling the page into a tube and using it as a straw to empty a bottle of Moet?
Or is it just the sad, tired performance of leftist revolution that we’ve seen over and over again, in which rich, nationalist, capitalists raise a glass of premium vodka to Russia’s right-wing imperial assault on Ukrainian civilians?
I’ll listen on the radio. Because Lord knows Mbalula will be there soon enough, to say the same things over and over again, almost as if they’re true, and someone will still believe a word he says.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.