SA’S BUREAUCRATS HIT PEAK FIRE POOL
o the ANC, everything is a fire pool now. Its leaders, when seconded to the government and exposed as failing, thump their chests in victimhood, lurching for the lexicon of excuses, reframing it all as “out of context” or a “political witch-hunt”.
Asked last week on radio about the backlog in mining licence applications, South Africa’s avuncular mining minister Gwede Mantashe rounded on the Daily Maverick, which had simply reported what his own department had told IFP MP Themba Msimang in parliament. Msimang had asked how many applications had been approved this year, and Mantashe’s officials replied that of the 2,525 applications received since April, “nil” had been processed.
Actually, Mantashe later told 702’s Clement Manyathela, 674 mining rights applications had been approved, before adding sagely: “674 is not nil.” He grumbled that Daily Maverick reported this because it is “making me a project” and “tends to distort facts”.
Perhaps Mantashe should confront the awkward truth that if any facts were distorted, this came from his own department. If his officials had, as they later claimed, actually processed hundreds of applications from the previous year (which still leaves a backlog of 3,000 applications, mind), maybe it should have reported that context to parliament too. Yet victimhood is a much more snug fit than accountability. It’s the same instinct we saw when ANC secretarygeneral Fikile “Fixfokol” Mbalula bombastically talked himself into a corner, whining how Jacob Zuma had double-crossed the ANC by starting his new Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Party. Why would he do this, Mbalula bleated, when ANC officials had gone to parliament and “said a swimming pool is a fire pool this was a lie [and] it is difficult to explain lies”.
Inevitably, this blew up. So Mbalula complained that his words had been “deliberately twisted” to make it seem as if the ANC had lied about the fire pool. This was actually taken out of context, said Mbalula. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for
Delightfully, no-one bought it not even Mantashe, his predecessor as secretary-general. Mantashe said Mbalula had “said things he should not have said”, pointing out that “when you lead, you count every word you say”. Mantashe should know, being an expert in counting and the difference between nil and 674.
Anyway, his picture of a slick bureaucracy pumping out licences faster than Joburg buildings are burning down contrasts with stories from insiders about what’s actually happening at his department of mineral resources & energy a critical arm of the government when it comes to securing foreign investment.
Lawyers forced to interact with that department have been complaining for years. And this week, Rapport newspaper wrote that nothing has changed: piles of unprocessed mining licence
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