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In his State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa promised many nice things and made pledges that, if kept, would put South Africa on the right track.

However, if President Ramaphosa's SONA promises are to be realised, he will need a cabinet consisting of capable, and honest Ministers, and the existing cabinet, which is characterized by rampant corruption, negligence, and ineptitude, would need to be sacked, including Minister of Transport Fikile Mbalula.

Very few people can deny that Minister Mbalula is the department of Transport's biggest hurdle. He calls himself 'Minister fear Fokol,' or 'fear Nothing' when a more appropriate nickname would be 'Minister do Nothing.'

Under Mbalula's leadership, the backlog of road maintenance has exploded. Mbalula has helped sink South Africa into a big pothole.

His list of failures include:

Presided over the collapse of Metrorail – In an unprecedented act of dereliction of duty by a Cabinet Minister, Fikile Mbalula has presided over the wholesale collapse of the Metrorail system across the country. Commuter train services across the country remain grounded with only a few corridors operating on limited service. The collapse of Metrorail has forced commuters to spend a substantial amount of their income on transport costs as they look for pricier options to get to work.

Failure to take action to replace the ‘old driving license machine’- Fikile Mbalula almost collapsed the driver's license issuing system in the country when he did not take immediate action to have the only available driver's license printing machine fixed in time. The machine has been out of service since November 2021 because of flood damage. This meant that the Department had a full month within which it could not issue any driver’s licenses across the country.

High flying life when most South Africans are struggling to make ends meet - At a time when millions of South Africans are sitting at home without jobs, Fikile Mbalula and his former colleagues in Cabinet spent about R10 million of taxpayer funds on business class flight tickets. The data obtained by the DA revealed that Fikile Mbalula and his spouse pocketed R183 920 in flight tickets.

Entities under the Department of Transport continue to be poorly managed – Despite firing the Board of Prasa in 2020, the entity’s financial performance has not improved, instead Prasa continues to receive poor audit outcomes. His poor attempt at cleaning up Prasa was laid bare when, soon after firing the Prasa board, he went on to appoint a new one which was headed by former ANC MP Leonard Ramatlakane. The irony was completely lost on him that cadre deployment was the primary reasons why Prasa had become a dysfunctional entity.

Wasteful expenditure on AARTO litigation – Instead of acknowledging that the government erred in promulgating the AARTO Act, Mbalula has chosen to waste taxpayers money deciding to appeal a Gauteng High Court ruling which declared that AARTO was unconstitutional and invalid. For years, the DA had consistently maintained that the Act infringed on road user rights to administrative justice due to its arbitrary demerit system.

South Africa deserves better than a Minister who spends more time putting out Twitter fires than tending to the urgent issues of what should be his daily responsibilities.

Mbalula may have earned the title of "Minister of Twitter," but we believe he has no business serving as Minister of Transport. Mbalula must resign so that he may devote more time to Twitter, which, by all accounts, is where he likes to spend his time.

Issued by DA Shadow Minister of Transport, Chris Hunsinger MP