With about 100m to go before the R43 reaches the town of Worcester in the Western Cape, there used to stand on either side of the road, two of those large Arrive Alive signboards. I’m sure you know the kind, mounted alongside roads, exhibiting motor vehicle statistics, the percentage of vehicles recorded speeding, the number of accidents. Presumably these figures related to the stretch of road where each signboard stood.
When dreaming up this signboard campaign did the Minister of Transport, Dullah Omar, and his advisers seriously consider practical realities? Did they believe that, seeing one of these signboards, the average motorist would actually pull up, reverse along the side of the road and take time out to read and absorb the
statistics displayed? There was far too much information on the signboards to be read by a driver travelling even slowly, and whose attentions, anyway, would be distracted from the more important business of driving safely.
The signboards were another genetically unstable brainchild of Dullah Omar’s department and, like others before it, is now in the process of being aborted. In the Department of Transport’s ‘Strategies Nursery” there’s not a lot of difference between the infants and the infantile.
South African motorists will no longer be required to read and be deeply ‘incentivised” — to use one of Dullah’s stylish coinages — to drive responsibly by Arrive Alive signboards. They are currently being scrapped, thrown away, dispatched for burial. I don’t have figures for the rest of the country, but the Western Cape had 220 of the signboards, so it may be assumed that the national total could be well in excess of a thousand, maybe two.
How many millions of public money were squandered on this enterprise? How many hundreds of thousands of precious traffic police man-hours were wasted on the updating of the statistics, sometimes to ludicrous effect. The two signboards outside Worcester stood opposite each other and regularly displayed totally conflicting figures. And should you think the signboards futile, you should listen to the excuses for the road carnage that have emanated from the Department of Transport while Dullah’s been steering.
Bless his tasteful djellabahs, Dullah Omar has never publicly been known to concur with any opinion that shows even a hint of conflicting with his own. Questioned about the road massacres of the recent holiday season, Omar fell back on the conventional ministerial response to difficult questions: first he blamed the road fatalities on ‘our past” and then assured dolefully that ‘future strategies” are being ‘worked on” — thereby cannily dispatching his obligations safely out of the present. ‘Anyone who has a better idea is welcome to get in touch with us,” blathered Omar, jiggling his eye-bags, implying that an indifferent public was to blame for inadequacies in government policy.
Minister Omar’s professional relationship with Trevor Abrahams, suspended CEO of the Civil Aviation Authority, has now come under brighter lights. The allegations against Abrahams are profoundly disturbing and one can’t help but wonder what will be Dullah Omar’s response if these allegations are proved to have foundation. Some of the chicanery of which Trevor Abrahams now stands accused would appear to have taken place right under Omar’s nose. It was Omar who reinstated Abrahams after an earlier scandal was quietly settled at departmental level. If this reinstatement is ever proved to have been an ill-considered decision, Dullah Omar will have to own up to his responsibility?
Any government minister possessed of but a smidgeon of self-doubt, would have resigned faced with the sort of appalling road-death tragedy that faces Dullah Omar. He shouldn’t even have to wait for the loud demands for resignation. They only made him haughtier. ‘I’m 68,” he fumed, ‘and I’ve never resigned from anything in my life.”
More’s the pity. The ‘new” South Africa has had to endure Dullah Omar in other than his current role. As it painfully recovers from its past, the justice department owes little to the Omar suzerainty. Admittedly there were highlights: he did drive out to the airport to embrace the African National Congress’s pet funds-hustler, Allan Boesak.
The Mbeki administration has this quaint need both to accommodate and succour overbearing political turkeys. Taking their lead from the boss, there exists a cabal of decidedly sub-standard ministers and senior executives in current government structures whose reaction to criticism of their often hideous ineptitude is usually a blend of hostility and arrogance. Our minister of health is an embarrassing case in point.
There’s little profit to joining the indignant throng of those demanding minsterial and other resignations, simply because such demands always seem to have the reverse effect on our state president. Calling for the resignation of an Mbeki appointee is a virtual guarantee of that individual’s continued occupation of his or her position — if not, promotion. The suspended ANC chief whip, Tony Yengeni, faces serious criminal charges of corruption and lying. Mr Mbeki has now charged him with the investigation of corruption in the Eastern Cape administration.
Perhaps that’s how Thabo Mbeki wants to be remembered, as the man who both selected and nurtured some truly abject incompetents.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby