TOM EATON | ‘Rail Fright’, a horror movie chugging along to a dilapidated station near you

This week, hundreds of thousands of cinemagoers will be doing a Barbenheimer — watching Barbie and Oppenheimer back to back — but I will not be joining them: if I wanted to hurt myself by enduring a five-hour marathon of lurchingly incongruous stories featuring plastic idiots and government employees inventing new ways of destroying everything, I’d just listen to a speech by Fikile Mbalula. 

Not that the Barbenheimer ordeal isn’t edifying in its own way, capturing, as it has, a revealing picture of our current moment. Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan clearly wants us to think about our penchant for self-destruction, but until we live in a world in which a film about nuclear devastation doesn’t instantly get transformed into a hashtag and a fun evening out dressed in pink, I’m afraid such introspection might remain beyond us.

Of course, speaking of a total incapacity for self-reflection brings me rather elegantly back to Mbalula, who, over the weekend, would have thrown Pravin Gordhan under the bus if we still had any of those in South Africa.

Blaming Gordhan for load-shedding and the dire state of the country’s rail network, Mbalula warned the minister of public enterprise to “move faster or otherwise we will move you”. 

It was the sort of warning Gordhan should take very seriously. We all know what happens to ministers who fail catastrophically to do their jobs but aren’t intelligent or resourceful enough to go and make a mint in the private sector: they become secretary-general of the ANC. 

Yes, they were fighting words, so much so that I can only imagine someone brought a bundle of pink Fizzers to work to celebrate Barbie and left them unattended on the kitchen counter.

As the sugar began to work its way out of Mbalula’s system, however, the party tried to hose down the room, issuing a press statement reassuring itself that nobody was going to remove Gordhan from anywhere, which, after all, is the guarantee the ANC gives all the meat suits above a certain pay-grade.

On the contrary, explained ANC spokesperson and natural prey of copy editors, Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri, the whole point of being in government is to tell the public to do your job for you, in this case, running the railways.

I’m not sure how much use I’ll be when it comes to fixing South Africa’s railway network. Which makes we wonder: does the ANC know that there are people who do this for a living?

“Rail Fright [sic] and logistics are essential in building a resilient economy of [sic] our country,” wrote Bhengu-Motsiri. But, she added, “government alone cannot succeed to [sic] roll back all of these challenges. South Africans from all walks of life have a singular and collective obligation to help government to craft policy interventions in addressing such challenges.” 

Now, I would argue that Rail Fright has already built a resilient economy in certain parts of the country, specifically those parts containing the banks that serve those ANC cadres who are invested in the private trucking industry, and the bars where they gather to further the aims of the revolution by pouring champagne onto the floor.

Indeed, without Rail Fright and its nightmarish visions of cheap, efficient rail transport wiping out the convoys of cash cows that clog our crumbling highways, the ANC might never have been motivated to do an Oppenheimer on our rail network or hollow out Transnet in the first place. 

Where Bhengu-Motsiri begins to lose me, however, is where she insists that you and I have a “singular and collective obligation to help government to craft policy interventions”.

It’s not that I don’t want to help. I do, obviously, and if her department of communications, information and publicity ever decides to change its policy and hire a professional writer for the first time, I’d be more than happy to put out a couple of press releases at their standard rate and then retire. 

The thing is, however, I’m not sure how much use I’ll be when it comes to fixing South Africa’s railway network.

Which makes we wonder: does the ANC know that there are people who do this for a living?

I mean, I don’t want to shirk my singular obligation, or even my collective one, but humans have been using electricity to transport people and goods by rail since 1879, and I’d bet good money that at some point in the last 144 years somebody has written down the method, or at least drawn a picture. (Incidentally, I was interested to read that the very first electric passenger train reached a top speed of 13km/h, which, in a peculiar coincidence, is exactly 13km/h faster than Mbalula moved at any point while he was minister of transport.) 

But where I get very confused indeed, and start suspecting that the ANC’s communications team might not, in fact, be communicating with anyone at all, is where I remember that you and I, and South Africans “from all walks of life”, have been doing what Bhengu-Motsiri is asking, and doing it for years. 

Admittedly, most of the policy interventions we’ve shared with her party have been framed in fairly blunt language, with an emphasis on four-letter words. Still, I think all of us who’ve answered Bhengu-Motsiri’s call have been pretty clear for some time now: maintain what’s there; build more, using competent people; don’t steal the money you should be using to train and employ those people; don’t shelter or promote anyone who’s been found to be stealing said monies.

You don’t need to be an Oppenheimer to understand that. You barely even need to be a Ken.