To paraphrase one of Shakespeare's most quotable soliloquies: "He is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. His is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Macbeth was ruminating on life rather than on an individual, but over time the Bard's lines have often been appropriated in popular culture to refer to individuals, one recent target being President Donald Trump.
And now step forward Fikile Mbalula, who between foul-mouthed outbursts and a risible response to a report that a government vendor paid around half the cost of a R680,000 family holiday to Dubai, waged a Trump-style Twitter war against Zapiro after his cartoon on this page a week ago depicted the police minister as a loudmouth who is all talk and no action.
This followed Mbalula's address to the people of Marikana in Cape Town, where 11 people had just died in a massacre. He told them: "We will arrest those tsotsis ... until they s**t themselves."On Monday, Mbalula tweeted photographs showing himself staring down at eight men lying on the side of a road, hands zip-tied behind their backs. This was a "midnight criminal space shakeup", he said, and a police media statement with pictures from the scene declared: "
A protracted investigation into the Marikana shooting incidents led police teams to the N1 outside the Huguenot tunnel where they arrested eight suspects last night ... They are expected to appear in court soon."
Neither the tweet nor the statement - quickly withdrawn - was true. In fact, when the tweet escaped Mbalula's overactive thumbs the men had already been set free without charge - but not without humiliation. They spent three hours on their faces awaiting Mbalula's arrival for his midnight photo shoot, followed by 48 hours in custody, and one of them was intimately inspected in a public area to see if he was circumcised.
They also claim to have been beaten, which is easy to believe - Mbalula has told police to "crush the balls" of criminals, to "let the criminals pee and drink their own urine", to "run them down if needs be and ... return fire with fire" and to "kick down doors and dish out dizzying blows"...