Milusi Gigaba, the new Minister of Finance, made his
character clear in his first address to the South African public only hours
after he was handed the most important portfolio. He stated very clearly that
he had spoken to the Ratings Agencies to reassure them that the Government
would not deviate from the track of fiscal discipline espoused and stoutly
defended by Pravin Gordhan, and that he was satisfied with the discussions. Now
he has disclosed that he had been informed by Standard and Poors that they
would be downgrading the rating of South Africa’s sovereign debt to below
investment grade, but had failed to ‘take the public into his confidence’
because S&P had ‘taken him into their confidence’. That downgrade was a
matter of the utmost significance to the South African public, who will suffer
for years to come the effects of that decision, yet he felt free to reassure
the public that the Treasury was in safe hands. Of course, one may wonder why
he told that blatant lie. It was a misleading of the public in a matter of
extreme importance, one which has already cost investors at least R50 billion.
A charitable observer, one who has failed to notice the way Zuma and his ANC
has bled the public over the years for their own benefit, might be willing to
take his facile excuse at face value. A less charitable observer, one who
understands what is happening, might be more disposed to ask how much profit
Gigaba and his masters (the Guptas included) derived from their knowledge that
the Rand would tank as soon as the truth became known by the uninformed
suckers.
Milusi Gigaba has already caused the tourism industry in
South Africa, one of the few brighter spots in the economy, to take huge losses
by his ill-advised and ham-handed imposition of onerous visa regulations, which
have made it much more difficult for foreign visitors to come to this country
to enjoy the delights of slums on every main road leading from an airport to
any city, as well as to soak in the reverence for (elsewhere) loathed ‘revolutionary
leaders’ like Max, Lenin, Slovo and Castro, all names which epitomize the
country which Zuma and his ilk are determined to emulate in this once-advanced
country. He has now demonstrated very clearly that he is a true Zuma man. He
has lied to the public, and the public now has good reason to doubt any words
that emanate from him in the future.
The second Minister to have shown his true character in the
first days of his tenure is the new Minister of Police, Fikile Mbalula , a
master of threat and bombast, but, apparently little else. In an address to
some seemingly unimpressed Policemen and –women, he demanded that they use the
firearms they have been given in the execution of their duty (the word ‘execution’
is used advisedly here), harking back to the heady days of the Marikana
Massacre, a highlight in the Presidency of Jacob Zuma. Those with long memories
will recall Zuma’s remark, early in his Presidency, that the South African
Police Service is not a ‘service; it is a ‘force’. Those words are ominous in a
country in which the Police are regarded as the enemy of the ordinary people,
in which cars driving innocently past a crashed getaway car on the side of a
busy highway are shot at by the Police, using their automatic weapons in the
way that any terrorist might do, in which the Acting Commissioner of Police
makes a statement that three of the men involved in the robbery at the Office
of the Chief Justice have been arrested, only to admit a few days later that
they would be charged with offences completely unrelated to that robbery after
a man he ‘invited’ to provide a statement, noting that the man was not a
suspect, subsequently hands himself in to the Police. (It is, of course, easy
to use the Security slush fund to buy an innocent person to confess to a crime
that the Police do not wish to solve, with the promise that he will be granted
early parole, as has been the custom with other ‘placeholders’ who assisted in
diverting the public gaze from the real facts.)
Mbalula has shown clearly that, although he would be dropped
like a hot potato in any civilized country in which civilized norms are applied
to public officials, he is undoubtedly a Zuma man.
The first week of the new Cabinet has lived down to the
expectations South Africans have developed for a Government led by the ANC. The
new Ministers join the coterie of criminals and incompetents that have seized
control of the country that Nelson Mandela inspired with such hope in the early
years of the new democracy. The worries that any ethical and honest South
African holds for the future have been intensified.
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