Mineral and Petroleum Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe suffered two hammer blows to his credibility yesterday. His ministry wrongly calculated the new, elevated diesel price and had to issue a correction a day later. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he followed this up with an extraordinary performance in Parliament where he answered a question that had not been asked on a subject that was not under discussion.
On Monday, Mantashe’s ministry announced the price of diesel was going to rise at Midnight Tuesday by R6,19 a litre. Yesterday, it corrected this, saying it had mistakenly moved a decimal, and the rise would be 92 cents a litre less. In the context of a rise of over R5 a litre, that may not seem much.
The significance can be seen when one considers the burden that would have fallen on every trucker. An average ore truck consumes 30 to 40 litres per hundred kilometres. The average tank size is about a thousand litres. That would mean an error of nearly R1,000 per full tank per truck. As there are about half a million trucks of this kind on South African roads, that could have resulted in a half billion Rand difference per refuel, which would have been devastating for the industry.
The Minister should give the public the assurance that the misleading information from his ministry was stopped in time before service stations elevated their prices by the wrong figure. He also needs to provide a mechanism for truckers to reclaim if they had to overpay. Maths may be hard, but the public has a right to expect a measure of exactitude from its highly paid public officials.
This embarrassment was compounded in the House when I made a statement on the need for a specialised police unit to combat mine crime. Minister Mantashe answered by saying the investment in mining of black capitalists should not be discounted. If that seems confusing, do not feel alone; the entire house seemed bemused.
The question that now has to be asked is: Have the Minister and his Department lost the plot?