It's time for Malusi Gigaba to man up and resign

Source: Ray Hartley- Rand Daily Mail, 29/07/2015

The resignation. A simple, powerful tool that allows the political
system to admit mistakes and start afresh, restoring public confidence
and proving that there is a price to pay for failing in public duty.
In South Africa it's not used enough. Instead of resignation, we have
golden handshakes, sideways shuffles, ambassadorships and a host of
other means of mollycoddling those who really ought not to have the
public's trust.
One such individual is Malusi Gigaba, the home affairs minister. Let
us leave aside for the moment the fact that home affairs has abandoned
the improvements introduced by previous ministers to slide back into
the slump of inefficiency.
Let us leave aside for the moment the fact that Gigaba's stewardship
of public enterprises was the period during which widespread board
gerrymandering, usually involving the appointment of incompetent
leadership or the bailing out of financially foundering organisations,
became the order of the day.
Let us leave aside for the moment his decision to centralise the
control of these enterprises in his ministry so that he could turn
this policy foolhardiness into a firmly entrenched system of patronage
which is now neigh impossible to alter — unless you pay golden
handshakes and appoint more ambassadors.
The real reason that Gigaba should resign is that he forced through
regulations which have severely damaged tourism, hurting a sector of
the economy that is vital to growth, jobs and which holds the very
identity of brand South Africa in its hands. There are qualified young
people not working in the tourism and hospitality industry right now
because of Gigaba.
He did so after being made fully aware of the dire consequences that
were to follow by the tourism industry, which provided extensive
intelligence on the likely outcome of this appalling policy.
He did so despite the fact that the statistics show that trafficking
through official ports of entry is not widespread. It turns out that
child traffickers don't pitch up at airports pretending to go on
holiday with their human cargo — they sneak across borders at night,
they hide in containers, they swim on shore from vessels, all of which
activities are not prevented, even slightly, by regulations governing
tourism.
His department went so far as to present a highly speculative figure
of 30 000 victims of trafficking to parliament as fact when the real
statistics are much, much lower. Deceiving parliament is not a mark of
good leadership.
Gigaba promised to consult the tourism industry before introducing the
new regime. He never did. Breaking promises is not a mark of good
leadership.
Once introduced and the predicted devastating outcome of the
regulations became obvious to all — real actual and dramatic declines
in the numbers of people visiting the country — Gigaba refused to
accept that he was now an emperor strutting about in his y-front.
He toughed it out with rhetoric about not being dictated to,
insinuating that those opposed to his destructive polices were somehow
uncaring about the fate of trafficked people.
Well, Cabinet has finally decided that enough is enough and the
tourism minister, Derek Hanekom, has announced that a Cabinet
committee will review the regulations which have clearly had a
detrimental effect.
The outcome of this evaluation is unknown. Will it stand by Gigaba?
Will it excoriate him? Will government change direction?
What is certain is that it is time for Gigaba to man up. He must
acknowledge the dire consequence for jobs and for the country of his
blind hubris and tender his resignation. If he doesn't, the
dysfunction and lack of public trust will linger, fester and brew into
a new crisis when he next takes a flight of policy fancy.