A MAN DEFINED BY ARROGANCE

Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula and his department were prominently featured, at taxpayers expense, in a full page advertisement in the Cape Times (15/10/15), and presumably in other newspapers of daily circulation. The department was featured because it received a clean audit award from the Auditor-General. Knowing the minister's penchant for unrestrained exuberance and self-aggrandisement, it would not be surprising if he tweeted this achievement to the sounds of "seventy-six trombones and a hundred and ten cornets". One can understand the minister's delight in the department receiving a clean audit - a rarity indeed amongst government departments where waste, incompetence , corruption, and a host of other ills plentifully abound. Truth be told, however, a clean audit should be the norm and not the exception. The fact that the minister deemed it necessary to incur, at presumably great cost, full page newspaper ads to assert that he and his department, are not a "bunch of losers", is simply grandstanding. Moreover, it evokes a deep sense of sadness in that a rare clean audit somehow prevents South Africa's moral barometer from plunging further. Aristotle aptly summed it up: "One swallow does not a summer make". The minister in the ad stated that he and his department "treat public money with the utmost care". Not so, spending taxpayer money on a self-congratulatory message is not only wasteful, but pompous and careless. In the future one hopes the minister will deliberate long and hard before spending taxpayer money on self-promotional newspaper ads. Instead he should earmark said funds to improving dilapidated sports facilities in the townships. I, for one, will then desist from taking umbrage to his use of less costly tweets, even if laced with hubris.