It’s not often that Fikile Mbalula, minister of transport and patron saint of sheltered employment, gets to announce major policy decisions.

At best, he is a type of talking clock, wheeled out once a year to announce the latest death toll on SA’s staggeringly murderous roads and explain his plan to make them fractionally less murderous, which is to ask South Africans to drive a little bit better. At worst, he is, well, the same politician he’s been since he led the ANC Youth League.

On Friday, however, he found himself at the forefront of national policy like a fraying teddy bear tied to the bug-splattered radiator of a speeding dump truck, happily insisting that the state will be subsidising SA’s taxi industry by April next year...