This week, as international relations and cooperation minister Naledi Pandor admitted that her department spending R118m on a hotel in New York was “an embarrassment”, it was once again reported that MPs have accused her of running her department like a “spaza shop”. This is obviously incredibly unfair to the owners of spaza shops.

It’s also fantastically dickish of the MPs who used the analogy. Indeed, if I were Desmond Moela, an ANC MP who used the spaza analogy, and I were sitting in parliament drawing a fat paycheck from the party strangling SA’s economy to death, I like to think I wouldn’t be so callous as to mock hardworking, job-creating South Africans who, unlike my colleagues in government, know which end to hold a spoon...