Two members of the executive — Lindiwe Sisulu and Fikile Mbalula — are particularly useless in a very general kind of way. Thus, a powerful metaphor for a common problem.
The art they have perfected is to break something and move on. Their respective track records, for example, cut a stark contrast with someone like Angie Motshekga, who has been allowed to systematically break one thing — education — over a long period of time. No, for these two, it’s the depth and breadth of their incompetence that is impressive.
Sisulu is the archetype for this approach. Mbalula the apprentice. But he is learning fast.
Since 1996, Sisulu has been moved nine times, and occupied seven different portfolios as a minister or deputy minister: home affairs, intelligence, defence, human settlements, public service, international relations, human settlements (together with water and sanitation) and tourism — her current gig.
Such skill — to be able to lead with confidence such an array of departments. Truly she is our most gifted politician. There is nothing she cannot do. She can run spies, armies, public servants, diplomats and engineers. She understands intelligence, war, human infrastructure, immigration, sanitation and how to get tourists to have a good time. You can see why she thinks she should be president.
As for outcomes, those are a little less impressive. Our intelligence services are a mess, the army has been reduced to opening bakeries, the public service is riddled with corruption and ineptitude, our foreign relations are a joke and as for tourism, well, let’s just say it’s been a while since we’ve seen an actual tourist — admittedly in part thanks to an executive-wide, Covid-19-driven assault on common sense.
But on she goes. Never fired, always redeployed. She spent three years at intelligence, three at defence, two at public service, two at human settlements (the second time around), one at international relations and three in charge of water and sanitation. Basically just enough time just to be settled in, before she is moved on. Just enough time not to break anything too fundamentally. But enough to deliver nothing of any real consequence.
Mbalula’s executive career has followed a similar pattern: sport, police, now transport. He is young, so there are still many more things for him to break, but already he is demonstrating the same vast set of skills Sisulu has, and the same kind of outcomes. Sport is a gigantic mess, the police service is imploding, and then there is transport: slowly but steadily collapsing on all fronts. Midas turned everything he touched to gold. Mbalula turns everything he touches to compost. Let’s call it “the Mbalula touch”.
And what will the consequence of this be? Move Mbalula, of course. To a new portfolio. A blank slate. We have yet to tap his vast expertise on, well, whatever. Science and technology? Sure, let’s give him a run and see. Satellites and lasers are a lot like buses and trains if you think about it hard enough.
This trend isn’t particular to Sisulu and Mbalula. Naledi Pandor has been in charge of five different portfolios in her time. Likewise, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, three, in no time at all. Jeff Radebe was another great everyman — five portfolios as diverse as justice, energy, transport, public enterprises and public works. There was nothing he could not do.
You can look at it from another direction: take every cabinet position since, say 2009, and see how many incumbents it has had. It might be the case that some ministers only ever held a portfolio or two, but between them all, nothing is ever really stable.
Come to think of it, with so many genius politicians, capable of mastering so many diverse portfolios, you do wonder: why does nothing work?
The reason is that the ANC conceives of the executive as a collective of secretaries, there to push buttons and cut ribbons. Never to bring to a department a specific set of specialised skills, designed to add particular value, insight and strategic nous over a substantive period of time. So many of these appointments are just ceremonial. A robot could do them. If you wanted to be bolder, you could say a robot could do them better.
For the ANC there aren’t different portfolios. There is just one kind of portfolio. A single booth, with the same levers that anyone can pull, on instruction from the party’s national conference. So it doesn’t matter if it’s Lindiwe Sisulu or Fikile Mbalula, defence or tourism, anyone can do anything. Because it’s all the same thing.
Only, it’s not. To be an effective national minister you need two things: time and expertise. You can, in a long career, perhaps master two portfolios. Even that requires some serious skill. These are hugely complex areas that require deep and meaningful knowledge. More than two, and it quickly becomes farcical. Seven and you aren’t serious at all. And it shows.
And it’s no different as you move down the food chain — at provincial and local government level, there are no experts, only robots. The same for so many public entities. An army of the unthinking, there to beep on command, or be moved to another power source if their batteries seem to be running low.
It is true that when it comes to selecting a cabinet, the ANC’s various presidents are limited (with the constitutional exception of two outside appointments — never utilised) to the talent available in its national caucus. In turn, that the ANC’s national caucus has been, over the past two decades, reduced to a collection of the undertalented but overambitious. Still, endlessly shuffling them is just a pretence. It might give the impression performance matters, but in truth it’s just a merry-go-round of incompetence.
You’d never get that impression if you listen to these people. As skill has been decimated, so egos have become inflated. Listen to Fikile Mbalula and the bravado is enough to make you think he actually confident in his own ability. He is not. He is a flapping fish on the bank of a raging river of which he’s totally at the mercy. And its waters are gushing chaos, not order.
Jacob Zuma perfected the art of governing through chaos. Under him, cabinet members and directors-general swapped places every six months. Ramaphosa has slowed the wheel, but what does it matter? Fast or slow, it’s the same people.
Crises produce contradictions. We are awash in them. One of the greatest is a cabinet filled with ostensible geniuses, able to master any portfolio; simultaneously, a state on the brink of collapse. In turn, the idea that everyone is an expert, and yet no-one is.
There is an upside though: zero accountability. When history produces a great reckoning, and documents in detail the ANC’s contemporary reign of destruction, who will it blame? Hard to pin the collapse of any one portfolio on any one person. And that’s the power of the collective for you: its greatest strength is not the combined value it adds, but its ability to mask individual mediocrity. The hive mind is, in truth, mindless.
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