President Cyril Ramaphosa, Minister of Agriculture John Steenhuisen, and Deputy President Paul Mashatile.
(File photo by RODGER BOSCH / AFP)
Thursday.
Beef is piling up and agendas are getting crowded in the clearing house — should that be the slaughter house? — set up by the head of state as a forum for resolving disputes between partners in the government of national unity.
Instead of warming up for the weekends, the representatives assigned by the 10 parties to serve on the cabinet technical committee are set to spend every Thursday evening for the next half a decade slugging it out over policy issues referred by their parties for resolution.
It met for only the second time this week, and there are already enough complaints — most of them generated by the Democratic Alliance (DA) — to keep Deputy President Paul Mashatile and the rest of the committee busy until the next national and provincial elections.
It’s not only the ongoing dramas over the National Health Insurance (NHI), the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act, the cynical tit-for-tat at metro council level and the freezing out of the DA from the government in Gauteng that are piling up in Mashatile’s in tray.
President Cyril Ramaphosa had hardly finished delivering South Africa’s country statement at the Brics summit in Kazan, Russia, before his minister of agriculture, John Steenhuisen, was on social media calling the manager.
The president took along a handful of ministers from the ANC for the visit to Russia, the host of the 16th Brics summit, putting Mashatile in charge of the country and leaving John behind to water the mielies or whatever it is he gets paid to do as agriculture minister.
That went well.
It is unclear at this juncture whether it was a fit of fomo sparked by somebody else getting his seat on the presidential jet, or a call from Helen Zille to remind him who his real boss is, that triggered John’s latest spat with the man who pays his salary.
Either way, it didn’t take long for John to hammer out a 280 character “not in my name” over the love shown to Vlad the Invader and Mother Russia by the head of state on behalf of our fair nation.
The president’s offending statement was: “We continue to see Russia as a valued ally, as a valued friend who supported us right from the beginning, from the days of our struggle against apartheid.”
Nothing factually incorrect there.
Those limpet mines and AK47s on the posters on government buildings and shopping centre walls in the 1970s and 1980s came from somewhere — although Russia was then part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Vlad was not the comrade in charge.
According to John, acknowledging this historical relationship between South Africa and Russia — and being polite to the summit host — is wrong because Putin’s is an “authoritarian regime that is currently violating international law by waging an imperialist war of aggression against a sovereign state”.
A bit like what’s going on in Lebanon, as we speak, where an “authoritarian regime is currently violating international law by waging an imperialist war of aggression against a sovereign state”.
I haven’t seen anything from John on social media condemning that particular invasion, or the shelling of United Nations peacekeepers on the Lebanese border, another violation of the international law he’s so quick to quote.
I won’t hold my breath.
John’s sense of outrage appears to be fuelled by who is doing the invading — and who is being invaded — rather than the act of invasion itself.
I hope he proves me wrong.
John took things a step further, saying the president needed to consult his coalition partners ahead of making policy statements, and essentially ask them for permission to outline where his government stands on issues before he does so.
John sounds a bit like the South African Communist Party’s Solly Mapaila, whose seat on the plane he got during the president’s state visit to China, with the demand to be consulted on every cabinet policy decision.
One didn’t hear much moaning from John about the One China policy when he was slinging mangoes to Xi Jinping and punting trade relations with our Brics partners, Russia included.
This hasn’t stopped the DA from deciding to refer to the decision by the department of international relations and cooperation to instruct Taiwan to move its representative office from Pretoria — where the embassies are — to the economic hub, Johannesburg.
The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) is set to follow suit on the Taiwan issue, which its president, Velenkosini Hlabisa, said is destined for referral to Mashatile’s clearing house for processing.
The IFP also has drama over how the NHI will be implemented, so for Mashatile and associates, busy Thursday nights lie ahead.