BRUCE'S LIST: Cabinet reshuffle? Maybe not tonight, Josephine

SA’s fevered politics takes no prisoners. There isn’t anything we won’t believe and there’s nothing that surprises us. For the past couple of days there’s been fierce speculation about a cabinet reshuffle. There were two reasons. First, the Sunday Times reported that former Eskom and Transnet and Public Investment Corp CEO Brian Molefe was to be made a member of parliament. Second, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma was due to finish her stint as African Union (AU) Commission chair at the end of January and come home to SA (where she has spent most of the AU time anyway) and that place would also be made for her in her former husband’s cabinet. It all sounds so plausible and real because, well, Jacob Zuma is desperate.

But hang on. First, it appears that Dlamini-Zuma won’t be home (or, rather, won’t necessarily be available) for a cabinet job for the next three months. That’s because she is obliged to do a three-month hand-over to her successor. Second, it may well be possible that Molefe may not want to be finance minister, which was the immediate assumption in the Sunday Times story. Molefe is a very complicated man. He is a CEO, not a politician. When you’re the CEO you can pretty much do what you want, be as bumptious as you like, and you can control the optical consequences of what you do — that is to say, you can make your company accounts look as sharp as you say they are. Not in politics, especially in the economy. Molefe knows this. His tears under pressure at an Eskom press conference last year were real. And he knows the economy cannot be turned around by national treasury while departments like trade & industry and economic development have their heads in the clouds, incapable of creating sustainable growth with policies that often do the very opposite. And while Zuma is simply not interested.

The only reason to take part in the attack on finance minister Pravin Gordhan and perhaps to be the instrument of his removal, would be to serve the vile agenda of Jacob Zuma and his business friends and cronies and his political backers in the provinces. I think Molefe is better than these people. I think he got sucked into the Gupta whirlpool. It was the stark facts exposed about the number of calls he made to them in former public protector Thuli Madonsela’s report on state capture that brought it home to him. He doesn’t need to keep digging that hole anymore. His resignation from Eskom was the honourable thing to do in a circumstance that had run out of control.

I was thinking all of this as I read Ranjeni Munusamy on how South African civil society can respond to the extent to which the Zuma administration is captured and broken. Obviously parallels are being drawn now between our civil society and President Donald Trump’s civil society in the US. There people have risen en masse against some of Trump’s madder edicts. Will the same happen here? I doubt it.

As much as Sipho Pityana may be right and as much as he may be determined, he is climbing a very steep mountain. Zuma has all the weapons he needs. Somehow Pityana’s Save SA campaign and the ANC veterans working with the ANC to reform it need to come together. Change in the ANC can only come from within it. The best way to accelerate that change is to vote it out of power but the opposition parties have yet to find a way into the heart of millions of ordinary citizens who vote ANC as a gut instinct. The road ahead is hard.

Prosecutor Gerrie Nel’s decision to run a prosecutions operation for AfriForum is, as Munusamy argues, part of our civil society response to Zuma. It is interesting because it is quite difficult to create the circumstances under which a private prosecution might be brought. But, for me, the object is clear. It is Zuma. We have forgotten what an awful year he faces. In a few weeks the supreme court of appeal will hear his appeal against the high court ruling last year that the decision to drop the fraud charges he faced in 2009 was irrational and that, by definition, the charges should be reinstated. The supreme court is usually quick and my bet is that Zuma will lose. He’ll then have to go to the constitutional court and he’ll lose there too. That will mean that the National Prosecuting Authority will have a live set of fraud charges to bring against Zuma as early as June. And when the NPA dithers and declines to prosecute the charges, Nel will ride in on the AfriForum horse. Pierre de Vos is good on the hurdles Nel would face. But I also liked Mandy Wiener’s more personal profile of the advocate. He is one tough cookie.

Finally, to the US. I have to share this piece with you. I belong to the rather large group of people who think Trump may be mentally ill. And I’m sure that his mental state carries with it the path for the Republican Party to eventually impeach and remove him from office. But it is not until you truly appreciate the powerful hold that a man called Steve Bannon, an extreme rightwing ideologue and publisher, has over Trump that you realise how much damage he could do in the world in a relatively short time. This piece is the best introduction to Bannon that I have read. It is scary and embedded in it are enough sound bites from his media shows to scare one even more. Look, the fact is that, for the moment, Trump is carrying his voters with him. Early polls show that Americans approve, narrowly, of his bans on refugees from certain countries entering the US. But this show is heading for disaster. Just read this stuff. Jeez!