Mbalula bids to stay relevant as Zuma’s web of irrational appointments untangles

The Cabinet reshuffle has come and gone. And while everyone was focusing on the firing of Pravin Gordhan, no one thought the post-reshuffle drama would come from any of the other appointees because they were not central to the story.

They were collateral damage and were meant to just go along with the irrational reshuffle without causing any drama. But clearly someone forgot to tell Fikile Mbalula all this and he took his appointment as minister of police with a huge doze of exuberance, certainly more than the president would have wanted.

Mbalula has survived all of Jacob Zuma’s reshuffles not because he’s an efficient minister, but because he’s someone perceived by the president as having a real constituency within the ruling party.

Like newly appointed Minister of Finance Malusi Gigaba, he has come through the structures of the ANC Youth League and at some point, as president of the youth league, he was viewed as a kingmaker when it came to the appointment of officials within the ANC. Indeed, he played a crucial role in the events that led to the recall of Thabo Mbeki and the appointment of Jacob Zuma as president.

Within the ANC itself, he was rewarded by being made head of election campaigns and Zuma later appointed him deputy minister of police. So loyal was he that it was only a matter of time before he was made full minister.

Although he was made minister of sport, something considered peripheral and safe, he managed to keep himself in the public eye through a sometimes embarrassing presence on social media.

Then, Zuma thrust him back into the spotlight and the first thing he did was go after another of Jacob Zuma’s irrational appointments, the head of the Hawks, Berning Ntlemeza. Ntlemeza had been branded as dishonest and lacking integrity by the high court before the president saw fit to ratify his appointment as head of the police’s elite investigative unit.

This did not come as much of a surprise because that’s what we have become accustomed to when it comes to the president: he appoints those he knows will fight his battles for him because they owe their jobs to him. And Ntlemeza wasted little time fulfilling his mandate.

He went after Pravin Gordhan with a flimsy case with the help of other of Zuma’s irrational appointees at the NPA. And as is almost always the case, the move left Ntlemeza and Shaun Abrahams with egg on their faces.

But even the most deft of spiders ends up getting caught in its own web if it’s not careful. Zuma’s web of irrational appointments spans all institutions that guard our democracy. At some stage, his appointments were bound to trade blows with each other. The Mbalula-Ntlemeza row is one such case.

This is war that in any normal democracy would not happen. The high court has declared Ntlemeza’s continued employment as head of the Hawks unlawful. But because he knows he is Zuma’s chosen man, he has chosen to ignore the court ruling and taken Mbalula head-on, even threatening to use the courts to fight him off, forgetting that it’s the same courts that called him “dishonest and lacking integrity”.

Mbalula knows he needs to stay relevant even after Zuma is gone, so he’s not letting up either. And while they fight, it is you and I that suffer. Criminals are left to police themselves.

Sydney Majoko.

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