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I'm shocked, Cyril

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I'm shocked, Cyril

I'm shocked, Cyril

16th April 2021

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Award-winning columnist, Bhekisisa Mncube, tells President Cyril Ramaphosa that he is shocked to find out that all along, it is matriculants who have been running the government into the ground.

Sawubona Mongameli, His Excellency Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa. I am running low on ink, writing pads and patience. My English language kitty is almost bare. I am dog-tired of refreshing my inbox searching for your mail.

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It is sad to realise that you’re tone deaf and blind to hurting my feelings. In fact, I’m gatvol of the whole business of statecraft and imagined generational dialogues. For over a year now, I have diligently written weekly “love letters” to you in the vain hope that you will write back. You have wilfully failed to favour this lowly paid newspaperman with a presidential response. In other news, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi writes to me at the drop of a hat. What a G!

In case you didn’t know, this week a high court judge found that ignoring your e-mails (open letters included) constitutes aggravated misconduct. In his judgment in the matter SIU v Dr Bandile Masuku, Judge Roland Sutherland found: “The first aspect is that Dr Masuku was neglectful in his duties, as illustrated by his failure to attend to his e-mails, despite being in a critical leadership position.”

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This judgment vindicates my feeling worse than a jilted lover. I am totally astonished that a head of state refuses to engage in public discourse on the state affairs of which he is a custodian, “the quintessential commander-in-chief of state affairs”, as it were.

I deserve a presidential pardon (oops! response) to my weekly letters, otherwise, I am free to draw an adverse inference of neglect.

Put differently, I am shocked at this level of presidential lethargy. Forgive me, for I know that being surprised is your speciality. In 2019, when Eskom implemented stage-six load shedding, you, Mr President, expressed shock. You were also shocked at the revelations and extent of the state capture unravelling before the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into the same. If you have expressed shock once at your government’s ineptitude, you have done it a thousand times. I simply have neither the time nor column space to repeat your “shock moments”.

Allow me, Mr President, to have my turn at being shocked. I am shocked to find out that all along, it is matriculants who have been running the government into the ground. According to your minister of Public Service and Administration, Senzo Mchunu, 35% of senior managers in government do not have the necessary qualifications for the positions they occupy. Let me repeat, 35% of senior managers in government aren’t qualified for anything. Senior managers in public service require at least an NQF level-seven qualification, which is equal to a Bachelor’s degree or Advanced Diploma.

According to the latest data, there are no records of such qualifications for 3 301 of the 9 477 (5 447 at national level) senior managers in public service. Mchunu further revealed that 1 314 out of 4 028 senior managers in provincial departments do not have the required qualifications. I am shocked at the admission, not the actual facts.

You will recall, Mr President, that in my March “love letter” to you (which you ignored, by the way), I railed against civil servants hired and promoted to key positions for which they are neither suitable nor qualified. I didn’t know that you have 17 of these unqualified “senior managers” in the Presidency, of all places. Seventeen matriculants earning well over R1-million at the helm in the heart of governance, the Presidency! What are you going to do about it? Please spare me the tired phrases like “shock”, and “it wasn’t me who hired them, blah, blah”. Bollocks.

Mr President, I am shocked that in his wisdom or lack thereof, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng pleaded with uBaba to state the nature and the magnitude of the sentence that should be imposed on him if he is found guilty of contempt of court. uBaba wasn’t moved.

I was also shocked after news broke that ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule has widened the scope of the step-aside guidelines to include those implicated or alleged to be involved in wrongdoing but who have not yet been charged. If he insists on casting the proverbial net wider in his finishing expedition, it may collapse the ANC, considering that all comrades have “smallanyana skeletons”.

I am also shocked that ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte is still in her post after an audio recording in which she harangues the judiciary, was leaked. Duarte’s diatribe is fast paced, exciting, yet full of red herrings. Till next week my man. “Shock me.”

This Letter to Mahlamba Ndlopfu is written by Bhekisisa Mncube a former senior Witness political journalist, the 2020 regional winner in the Opinion category of the Vodacom Journalist of the Year Award, and author of The Love Diary of a Zulu Boy, a memoir.

This opinion piece was first published in the Witness/News24.

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