It can be difficult to empathise with the human caramel Swiss rolls who loll in the corridors of power in this country, but try to spare a thought for Fikile Mbalula and the dry-mouthed, sweaty-palmed terror he must have felt on Friday as more than 100 ANC MPs confronted him.
After all, it takes a great deal for ANC MPs to get angry. They didn’t get angry about helping steal elections in Zimbabwe, or garlic and beetroot, or Nkandla, or state capture, or Eskom, or Life Esidimeni, or Phala Phala. Not really angry. The kind of angry where you impeach people or resign in protest.
Which is why Mbalula must have been so frightened at the weekend as, according to the Sunday Times, he was faced with genuine crossness from the caucus.
What had roused them to such unprecedented action and agitation? Had the parliamentary cafeteria run out of custard? Or worse, had the revolution finally started and they’d discovered there was no plan in place for them at the vanguard of the revolutionary stampede to Waterkloof to board a private jet and redeploy it to Dubai?
As we now know, the MPs were furious with the people really responsible for the state of this country — the DA. That party, they told Mbalula, needed to be ejected from the government of national unity (GNU), in no small part for its shameful refusal to follow the official script, agreed upon by parties such as ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance. This was clearly to vote for a VAT increase, then say they’d only voted for it on condition it didn’t happen, and only then claim a win. (The DA, you will recall, took a disgraceful shortcut, opposing the increase from the start before jumping straight to the end and claiming vindication.)
The DA, the ANC gathering insisted, was “misbehaving” and needed to be given the old heave-ho. It was an interesting word for adults to use about other adults, implying as it does that the former group has a deeply paternalistic view of the latter.
But if one gives the ANC the benefit of monumental doubt, it’s possible they were simply referring to the behaviours politicians have to adopt and effect when they join a febrile and fractious set-up like the GNU; ways of going along to get along that might not come naturally but are required for the greater national good.
Consider, for example, DA leader John Steenhuisen and his increasingly hilarious inability to fire his chief of staff, Roman Cabanac, who sensibly continues to milk the letter of the law and the taxpayer for the million-odd rand salary owed to him. Is it incompetence on Steenhuisen’s part? Shamelessness on Cabanac’s? No. Both are simply behaving like the ANC, cosplaying the bumbling minister and his deployed cadre, to reassure the ANC that the DA can be worked with.
An even more vivid example of someone behaving for money is Blade Nzimande, who on Saturday said he had “noted with concern” the Trump administration’s plan to cut scientific and medical funding to SA, and was launching a “working group” to discuss the consequences.
It was quite a sight, this politician whose party has never contested an election speaking as if he has a mandate to launch anything more important than a helium balloon, this veteran communist expressing alarm that hypercapitalism has decided to be everything communism accuses it of being.
But that’s what it takes to thrive in modern politics. Well, unless you’re Mbalula; as unyielding as a stone in our shoe; as unmoving as an albatross around our neck. Never change, Fiks.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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