ANC stays blind to where the blame lies

One of the leading exponents of the ANC’s strongly held belief that denial is a river in Egypt, Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, was at it again this week, trying valiantly to dispel the notion among evil capitalists and their collaborationist media that the state is collapsing.

Ntshavheni denied vehemently that “cadre deployment” by the ANC was the reason for so much failure.

Yet, minister, the buck has to stop somewhere. And currently it looks as though it is sitting outside Durban harbour, along with a backlog of 70 000 containers, solely due to the collapse of our state-owned enterprise, Portnet.

And that is one of those entities which was a fertile ground for cadre dumping … err, deployment.

Shipping companies recently told customers they would have to introduce a congestion surcharge of $210 (close to R2 200) per container, starting in December – though Transnet (Portnet’s mother company) says it is in discussions to seek ways to avoid this surcharge.

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To be fair, some of the delays are down to bad weather but the failure to replace equipment and carry out maintenance is a more worrying reason for the backlog in Durban, which will only be cleared early next year and will hurt Christmas imports.

At the same time, there is a reported near 40-kilometre-long queue of ore trucks waiting to discharge their cargoes at the Port of Richards Bay.

That comes on top of a lack of capacity in the country’s rail freight network, which has seen mining companies forced to lay off workers because they cannot get enough of their product to export channels.

No, minister, your defence of cadre deployment and denial of state collapse is nothing more than whistling in the graveyard to keep the bogeyman at bay.

That graveyard, obvious to all except the ANC, is our country.

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