Want the best service possible from Mbalula? Be a beautiful young woman

I know it’s a little bit mean, but I couldn’t help but have a little chuckle this morning when all the pictures of Princess Mahlangu started doing the rounds.

In case you don’t know, she’s the young woman who was rescued from sex traffickers in Malaysia after supposedly being lured by a fake online beauty pageant.

Mbalula appears to have taken a huge personal interest in her case, and even paid the costs for her return flight home on Sunday from the Far East from his personal funds.

Mahlangu is a 24-year-old aspiring beauty queen and model from Bloemfontein and she looks like this:

Princess Mahlangu.

There seems to be some dispute about whether Mahlangu was really caught up in sex trafficking or actually lured by a fake competition, but Mbalula was adamant on TV news this morning that such a wonderful young woman could only be telling the truth.

Curiously, there’s an article in The New Age about how excited Mahlangu was to attend the “Miss United Countries SA pageant” in Malaysia, but that’s a whole other discussion.

“The QwaQwa-born young lady” said “she never thought the world of beauty pageants would take her this far”.

I bet.

It appears if it wasn’t for the concerted efforts of the SA Police Service getting in touch with Interpol and coordinating the rescue effort, Mahlangu and all the other beautiful ones from 14 countries may already have been sent off to the brothels of the world and/or organ harvesters of Southeast Asia by now.

Well done to Mbaks, I don’t want to take anything away from his achievement, and I must say I far prefer him to our previous police minister, Mr Firepool Himself, Nathi Nhleko.

It just seems that being a sexy young woman helps a lot in the crime-fighting stakes when you’re dealing with Mr Razzmatazz.

He was panned for sexism in May for ranting in a speech about the fact that Sandile Mantsoe was arrested for killing “such a beautiful girl, [a] yellowbone”, in reference to the beautiful Karabo Mokoena.

At the time, the minister was criticised for implying that the lives of “beautiful” people are somehow more important, and for a state official to use the term “yellowbone” was possibly even more problematic, because it implied that lighter-skinned black women are supposedly more aesthetically pleasing than darker ones.

Then there’s the fact that he’s been tweeting pictures of beautiful police officers or responding to tweets about them, which would make one wonder how much of an old horndog the former youth league president actually is.

Whatever one’s view of our most colourful ANC politician by far, there’s little doubt he does what he likes, and pretty much says what he likes. There’s much to like about the man, but he’s also enormously frustrating. Because of his planet-sized ego and general desire to be the centre of attention, he’s perpetually at risk of making a fool of himself one way or the other.

All that aside, objectifying women when you’re in charge of the division of the state at the centre of fighting some of our most chronic crimes in the form of rape and the abuse of women is not ideal.

Let’s hope Minister Wanya Tsotsi cares as much about all the rest of us – the fat, old, pockmarked, crooked-toothed, big-eared, too light/too dark, too short, too tall, squint-eyed, ugly majority.

Charles Cilliers, Citizen.co.za digital editor