Last week, in the Joint Standing Committee on Defence, we were busy discussing a presentation by the Department of Defence on the Defence Industry Lekgotla and its implementation framework strategy.
South Africans witnessed the full, unvarnished collapse of whatever remains of executive dignity under the African National Congress.
Minister of Defence and Military Veterans Angie Motshekga did not merely fail to address a legitimate concern. She descended into crude, personal obscenity.
When I described her extraordinarily cavalier conduct in floating the prospect of PIC funding without any foundation, I used the well-known and perfectly ordinary English saying that the Minister was shooting from the hip. This suddenly made her feel entitled to respond with the most terrible profanities. She declared that I was speaking “from a part of my body where all the stinks come from”.
A whole Cabinet minister, entrusted with the defence of the Republic’s sovereignty, told a Member of Parliament, in a formal parliamentary committee, that he was speaking out of his backside. This is either born of a complete inability to accept any criticism, or of an astonishing lack of understanding of acceptable language and ordinary sayings.
She appears to have concluded that it is somehow legitimate to answer a perfectly standard English expression – “shooting from the hip” – by descending into base references to someone’s backside and the place where stinks come from. The result was absolutely base, uncouth and disgusting.
This is not robust political exchange. It is the language of a person who has run out of answers, arguments and self-respect.
The context makes the episode more damning. The Minister first floated this prospect of PIC funding for the defence industry at the Defence Industry Lekgotla, held from 20 to 22 July 2026 at the CSIR International Convention Centre in Pretoria.
Shooting from the hip
In the final plenary she casually advanced the idea that alternative funding might be sourced from the PIC, shooting from the hip in a manner that created unnecessary and false hopes and expectations among industry participants, soldiers and the public.
I have repeatedly pointed out what any competent minister would have established through the most basic research before making such a proposal: the PIC’s own investment mandate and regulations do not provide for its funds to be invested in weapons, defence or armaments. Pension assets managed on behalf of public servants cannot simply be redirected into the arms sector without fundamental legal and policy changes that have never been proposed, let alone approved. Parliamentary committees have already warned that any such notion is unrealistic and potentially destabilising, particularly given the PIC’s own governance turbulence.
Yet the Minister offered no research, no legal opinion, no engagement with National Treasury, and no serious costing. She simply threw the idea into the room and left false expectations in her wake.
When that carelessness was called out again today, during the discussion of the Department’s presentation on the Lekgotla and its implementation framework, she did not defend her proposal. She attacked the person who exposed it.
And when I rose on a point of order to demand that she withdraw the obscenity, ANC members on the committee tried to howl me down. The Chairperson simply muted me and refused to uphold my point of order. I was not allowed to defend myself against a Cabinet minister’s vulgarity.
That is not parliamentary procedure. That is the protection of an entitled executive by a party that has governed for more than three decades and can no longer tolerate even the most basic scrutiny.
This incident is not an isolated lapse of temper. It is the psychology of the ANC in its terminal phase. After thirty years in power, large sections of its leadership have come to believe that government is an entitlement rather than a responsibility. Criticism is treated as an insult. Oversight is treated as insubordination.
When cornered by the consequences of their own failures, they lash out like wounded animals.
Nauseating
Minister Motshekga is merely one of the most nauseating examples of this psychosis. What she said about me today tells us far more about her, and about the political culture that produced and sustains her, than it does about any Member of Parliament.
Her conduct is not unique within the ANC. It is of a piece with the behaviour of her colleagues.
Minister of Water and Sanitation Pemmy Majodina has repeatedly resorted to crude insults and dismissive profanities when challenged on the catastrophic failures of water infrastructure and service delivery under her watch. The outgoing mayor of Johannesburg, Dada Morero, has done the same, deploying vulgar language and arrogance when confronted with the city’s collapse in basic services, governance and accountability.
These are birds of the same feather. They are part of the same arrogance and destruction of the ANC. Motshekga’s descent into obscenity today simply reflects the same arrogant and psychotic attitude that has taken hold across the party’s leadership.
The same minister is clearly out of her depth and does not understand either the defence force or the defence industry over which she presides. She has produced no original idea, no coherent recovery plan, and no credible strategy to reverse the SANDF’s documented, accelerating spiral of decline. Equipment is aging past any realistic service life. Compensation of employees consistently overruns the budget while prime mission equipment sits unserviceable.
The force cannot reliably fly, sail or sustain itself at the levels required by its own mandates. Soldiers are left to operate with vehicles that break down, aircraft that cannot be flown, and ships that cannot be put to sea, yet the Minister continues to speak in slogans rather than solutions.
The “Journey to Greatness” strategy, approved by Cabinet, remains a document of aspirations without the rigorous costing, risk assessments, force-design choices or implementation roadmap that Parliament has repeatedly demanded.
Vague undertakings
When the Minister was previously scheduled to present on it, she withdrew at the last minute. When she does appear, she offers vague undertakings and delays rather than plans. She shows no grasp of the structural mismatch between the SANDF’s responsibilities and the resources available to it, nor of the industrial base that once sustained it and is now being allowed to wither.
Her interventions on the defence industry have been characterised by the same casual, unresearched approach that produced the PIC fantasy: announcements that create expectations without the substance to meet them.
The Department of Military Veterans fares no better under her watch. Court orders on registration and benefits for qualifying veterans have been ignored or delayed. Acting appointments have been allowed to stretch far beyond lawful limits. Veterans continue to wait for pensions, healthcare and dignity while the department consumes resources without delivering outcomes.
These failures are not abstract administrative problems. They are the direct result of a minister who lacks the knowledge, the competence and the seriousness required for the portfolio.
Instead, the priority appears to be the preservation of the ministerial office itself and the lifestyle that accompanies a senior Cabinet position. While soldiers face equipment shortages, veterans fight for basic benefits, and the defence industry waits for realistic policy, the Minister responds to parliamentary criticism with personal abuse and relies on her party colleagues to silence the critic.
This is the behaviour of someone for whom the survival of the political position has become more important than the survival of the institutions under her control.
The ANC cannot rescue itself from this condition. Its arrogance is not a temporary defect that can be corrected by internal reflection or a new leader. It is the accumulated psychology of uninterrupted power: self-aggrandisement, self-enrichment, and the belief that the party and its deployees exist above the ordinary rules that apply to everyone else.
When a minister can answer a standard phrase with references to bodily functions, and when the chair and the majority can simply mute the point of order, the democratic mechanism of accountability has already been hollowed out.
Sovereignty
National defence is not a secondary portfolio. It is the instrument through which the state maintains sovereignty. A minister who is out of her depth, who does not understand the force or the industry she is meant to lead, who offers unresearched fantasies about pension-fund financing, who cannot produce a credible plan to reverse the SANDF’s decline, and who answers criticism with obscenity is not merely a weak appointment.
She is a clear and present danger to the institutions she is supposed to protect. The continued presence of such figures in essential Cabinet positions is untenable. The ANC’s refusal to remove them is further evidence that the party is no longer capable of governing in the interests of the country.
Motshekga’s performance in the Joint Standing Committee on Defence was not an aberration. It was a demonstration of what has become the norm for the ANC and its arrogant leaders. A cornered minister, an entitled majority, a muted opposition, and a defence force left to continue its downward spiral.
The vulgarity was the least of it. The deeper obscenity is the arrogance that makes such behaviour possible, and the certainty that the ANC, in its current form, will never correct it.
[Image: Ricardo Teixeira]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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