At least there is one honest man in government. I couldn’t help noticing that while his colleagues were prancing around on the stage at the ruling party congress in Stellenbosch (whether they had a sense of rhythm or not) national executive committee stalwart and Minister of Transport Dullah Omar stood next to his chair in dignified silence, declining to fake intimate knowledge of a song-and-dance routine that was beyond his reach, and that had nothing to do with political integrity in any case.
Body language counts for a lot. Omar’s seemingly aloof behaviour in the obligatory dance of African National Congress sychophancy has probably cost him a lot over the years.
Who can forget the image of that grimly dignified group of Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Omar waiting almost in vain in Pretoria to receive the concluding report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission while party president Thabo Mbeki petulantly stalled the whole process on the grounds of tit-for-tat technicalities in the reporting of known abuses in ANC camps in Angola and elsewhere? It was a disgraceful and needlessly disrespectful sign of things to come.
Omar at that time was the incumbent in the critical portfolio of minister of justice. Like Nkosazana Dlamini in the Ministry of Health, he was acquitting himself well in one of the most difficult positions in the Cabinet, attempting the almost impossible task of restoring balance to apartheid’s most critical destabilisations of the natural human order.
Interesting to see what happened in the post-Madiba pecking order. Dlamini (or Dlamini-Zuma to the unreconstructed), having made remarkable transformations (in spite of a few expensive blapses) in an area where she was eminently qualified, that is, medicine and health care, was kicked upstairs to foreign affairs, a portfolio not best suited to her blunt, somewhat undiplomatic style. (But don’t get me wrong. On the scale of things, she’s still one of my favourite people.)
Omar on the other hand, was kicked out of a portfolio for which he was also eminently qualified, that is, the law, being a lawyer and whatnot, and was kicked downstairs to the transport portfolio vacated by the terminally feisty Mac Maharaj, who was not about to be given a second chance in the new order after all that chaos of the so-called Operation Vula.
Memories, of even the most trivial things, are long in the ANC. The only way you will ever know that your star is declining is when you start getting Chinese-eyes from the top leadership over some insignificant criticism you thought had been long forgotten. The frozen feeling at the base of your spine tells you that you are dead in the water — and your wife, children, grandmother and ancestors too (they have card-carrying sangomas who arrange the more obscure details).
Anyway, there must be some logic to the way Uncle Dullah was kicked downstairs to transport. Someone more uncharitable than Yours Truly (that’s me, you fool) might well have inferred that the thinking was that one Indian was as good as another, and with the impossible Maharaj off to better-paid work like selling offensive colonialist news magazines such as The Economist on the street, a charro slot had become vacant in the national government. Such uncharitable minds would deduce that Dullah Omar was that charro.
But those uncharitable minds would ignore the fact that Omar is far above mere charrohood. He is a capable individual in his own right and, for reasons known only to himself, has chosen to remain loyal to the party and the struggle and the ideal that he has sacrificed most of his life to serve. He has bitten the bullet and, like Maharaj before him, has taken on the impossible task of trying to untangle South Africa’s hopelessly corrupt, mafia-driven, user-unfriendly transport system, and the mayhem on the roads that is an inevitable result — especially at Christmas, when the motto ‘goodwill to all men” becomes a particularly savage rallying call to terminally aggressive behaviour behind the wheel.
Maybe it shows a touch of genius in the thinking of both our post-democracy presidents that someone with no tribal or territorial axes to grind should be sent in to deal with the taxi wars and other lethal legacies of our apartheid past. Besides (if we go along with those uncharitable minds) Indians are expendable if the fur really starts to fly in a renewed and unsolvable spiral of taxi violence, with government caught in the crossfire.
The question to be asked is why the so-called Democratic Alliance, with its appallingly namby-pamby record of limp-wristed opposition to the apartheid demon, should now be calling for Omar’s head simply because levels of road carnage are rising rather than falling in post-apartheid South Africa.
If anything, the DA should be rolling on their backs in gratitude that at least someone at a senior level in government is acknowledging, publicly, that a major part of the chaos on our roads, and therefore in our lives generally, is the legacy of intolerance, contempt and senseless competitiveness that we are living with without comment in this country. Rainbow-happiness, Simunye TV, and all the proudly South African campaigns in the world cannot disguise the fact that the nightmare is far from over. And Dullah Omar, by answering frankly to the question of where he feels many of our ills might lie, is at least facing up to an issue that should be central to our post-apartheid debate, but is obscured behind dodgy arms deals, encouragement of a rampantly irresponsible bourgeoisie and blandishments about social democracy and bourgeois elitism being more relevant under Third World conditions than social responsibility.
By admitting to many substantial and inevitable failings in his own ministry, Dullah Omar has gone further than most of his colleagues in acknowledging a reality, rather than pumping out yet another perfumed smoke-screen of dubious achievement.
The ineffectual DA aside, one wonders what price he will now have to pay for uttering these words of honesty.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza