Watch out ‘Minister Bombastic’ Mbalula

LAST Saturday’s article about the shuffled cabinet, specifically that new Police Minister Fikile Mbalula was “known as a fun-loving and well-travelled sports minister”, inspired the unearthing of some older soundbites relevant to his career ascendancy.

In late 2006, during a huge exodus of hard-pressed Zimbabweans, the 35-year-old ANC Youth League leader invited his Zanu-PF counterpart to a rally in South Africa and said, “You must go back and tell Mugabe that we love what he is doing for the people of Zimbabwe. We love him for redistributing the wealth and land.”

Later, after ushering in Julius Malema as his successor, he orchestrated the ANC’s 2009 election campaign, allowing Zuma to assume the presidency and appoint him deputy police minister – in which capacity he concertedly played on the poverty/excess, safety/danger tensions and splits that pervade South Africans’ minds as a result of the country’s brutal, corrupt history.

At every opportunity Mbalula, Nathi Mthethwa, “General” Bheki Cele and other securocrats amplified Zuma’s view that the fear of state violence is the most legitimate fear of all. Experts pointed out that such thinking was the legacy of apartheid trauma; that aggression plus more aggression could never equal less aggression; and that 2009 marked a 10-year high in deaths at the hands of the police.

How popular are Mbalula’s supposedly populist tactics really, though? With whom, exactly? Perhaps the sharpest question – now that his funny blend of bling-bling and bangbang is streaming from the very top of the hawkish ministry charged with keeping the country’s peace – is this: how long will it be before Mbalula’s bombast blows up in his own face?