A bad week for Lindiwe Zulu

Good week

Nomonde Nomtsheke has become SA’s first woman paratrooper. Nomtsheke, 28, a star player with the Bloemfontein Celtic women’s soccer team, joined the army in 2020, did basic training at the Infantry School in Oudtshoorn, and now serves in the SA Engineer Corps. She was born in Bloemfontein, home of 44 Parachute Regiment, where she completed a paratrooper’s course and did her first jump. According to an army spokesperson, Nomtsheke has an exceptional level of mental and physical fitness.

Bad week

They say, when people show you who they are, you should believe them. So when ministers are happy to see pensioners, among other welfare recipients, water-cannoned for getting a bit uppity about a lack of state support, then their subsequent failure to see that SA’s most economically fragile get their scant R350 grant is clearly par for the course. Lindiwe Zulu, the minister for social development, has once more underscored her eminent suitability for never holding a government job again by failing to ensure that the R350 Covid grants were paid in time to recipients last week, citing “due process” and “systems”. When the computer says no, it’s funny if David Walliams is coughing up the punchline; less so when it’s the difference between starvation and survival.