JAUNDICED EYE
As popular idiom has it, “success had many fathers, failure is an orphan”.
Or, as some popular idiots would have it, South Africans must take “collective responsibility” for the failures of their leaders. That’s the latest refrain from within President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration, presumably because blaming everything on apartheid is beginning to wear thin after a quarter century of misguided African National Congress governance.
The ANC has for a while been casting about for a more persuasive target than the 1652 arrival of Jan van Riebeek. It seems that the preferred solution is now to spread the blame more evenly and more widely than just targeting whities. Niftiest of all, if it works, is that it would mean ordinary citizens would voluntarily be taking on the crippling weight that their leaders are shrugging off.
Fikile Mbalula, once he of freebie first-class junkets to exotic destinations notoriety as sports minister during the Zuma years, in Ramaphosa’s Cabinet holds the decidedly less glamorous job of transport minister. Mbalula — who variously styles himself on social media as Mr Fix, Mr FearFuckAll and Razzmatazz, while churning out a daily stream of selfies — is very keen on collective guilt, um, responsibility.
One of the burdens that Mbalula would like to shed is culpability for the failure of his department to control the minibus taxi industry, which features disproportionately in serious traffic accidents and disports itself with lawless impunity. Last week, outlining what’s to be done about the festive season’s road accident carnage, Mbalula explained, “We must all appreciate that safety on our roads is a collective responsibility that we must all shoulder.”