Acting health minister doesn’t have time for gym or her PhD anymore

An interview given to Sunday Times daily, published on Tuesday, has provided some insight into the current mindset of the acting health minister, Tourism Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane.

She has hit back at detractors who’ve said the deputy minister of health, Dr Joe Phaahla, would have been a better choice to fill the shoes of Zweli Mkhize.

Mkhize was placed on special leave after being implicated in the Digital Vibes corruption scandal.

Speaking at a webinar last week, former finance minister Trevor Manuel said: “You can’t have somebody operating on one hand trying to deal with matters of tourism and cooking with Somizi, and on the other hand trying to have the necessary serious focus of resolving critical elements of the pandemic.”

He added that it was a matter of managing public perception.

Kubayi-Ngubane, however, is undeterred, pointing out that she has been fully committed to her additional tasks, to the point that she no longer has time to go to gym and that her PhD is also taking “a backseat”.

She added that she is “not money”, and cannot be universally liked.

Winter was not the busy time for tourism, which had in any case been battered by the pandemic, currently being driven by the highly infectious Delta variant first found in India.

Kubayi-Ngubane added that black women’s capabilities were sometimes doubted in South Africa, but she was up to the task and would prove her critics wrong, if given the chance.

Although she had not yet been vaccinated herself, she was keen to be, especially after losing friends and colleagues to Covid-19.