Former water and sanitation minister, then communications minister, and now minister of environmental affairs, Nomvula Mokonyane, is a mystery. What, in her wildest imagining, makes her think she is capable of the right thing? Yet she does, despite the possibility of perjurious oaths that surely should have occurred to her as she ascended a succession of high offices.
The briefest of résumés of Mokoyane’s conduct as a minister reveals her, first, as a knowing and staunch supporter of Jacob Zuma, the president of state capture. This taint alone should rule her out as unfit for any work requiring honesty, integrity and competence. But no. Even the deeply compromised labour federation Cosatu, now less than party to a ruling triumvirate, has denounced her as corrupt, immensely incompetent and inexperienced, to quote a Business Day report.
Among other charges, Mokonyane has been fingered by none less than that paragon of virtue and former public protector, Thuli Madonsela, as answerable to the auditor-general over “irregularities and improprieties” related to the expansion of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. She is also under investigation by the Special Investigating Unit over suspected wrongdoing in the awarding of tenders by the water & sanitation department.
Mokonyane failed and she is absolutely guaranteed to fail again. The mystery is, why did she fail?
The consequences of Mokoyane’s tenure at the department are floating down the Vaal River and the Crocodile and the Hennops, and down almost every other river across the country. They are welling up in the groundwater. We find her consequences below sewerage works and in pit latrines and in the drought-ravished Western and Eastern Cape. Hers is day zero in rural towns and country hospitals where surgeons cannot wash their hands for want of water and dialysis patients die for want of pressure.
There is not a town in the country nor district — not one — that does not face a water crisis of some sort.
Mokonyane failed and she is absolutely guaranteed to fail again. The mystery is, why did she fail? Did she not understand the nature of water? Did she not understand that if the water supply fails in Sannieshof in North West, it fails also in Murchison in KwaZulu-Natal? Water connects us all. Without it there can be no economy, no mining, no pen-pushing in Pretoria, no life.
Dringher tenure at the department, did Mokonyane not once read the pay-off line scribed under the departmental logo: “Water is life, sanitation is dignity”?
She deprived the nation of both.
The thing is, not only will Mokonyane’s new environmental portfolio include influence over water affairs, where she has demonstrably failed, but also over the soil in which we produce our food, and over the air we breathe, and over the biodiversity on which everyone depends for life and fortune. Over this, the underpinning of everything else on which the beleaguered SA people pin their ardent hopes, President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed someone who is guaranteed to drive the nation into poverty, disease and misery.
This is the greater mystery. Coming off a presidential low base, Ramaphosa has so far acted with a degree of integrity and, considering the precariousness of his position in the ANC, he may be forgiven for making compromise appointments such as Mokonyane’s, if that is what it is.
The wags may ask what Mokonyane has on Ramaphosa? But let’s not be cynical. If we lose hope now, we’re finished. Instead, it may be better to grant Ramaphosa the benefit of his assessment that he needs unity in the ANC to survive long enough as president to do the work the country so desperately needs.
This does not mean Ramaphosa has not erred. Perhaps the president is a little busy right now (perhaps everyone wants a piece of his patronage) and the nation should be patient. In this way he might be forgiven and enjoy the nation’s continued support.
That is unimportant, however. What is important is that Mokonyane is dangerously deluded, incompetent and quite possibly corrupt. SA cannot afford someone like her in charge of the environment, and neither can the ANC. And SA can hardly afford the faction backing Mokonyane to have any influence in the affairs of our nation.
There is time yet, Mr President, to throw this charlatan out on her ear.
• Blom is a flyfisher who likes to write.
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