Shock horror! Cyril Ramaphosa has been back in the country for three days and he’s done absolutely nothing. Well, ok, getting a new Eskom board in place before dashing off to Davos was a real accomplishment. And he talked a good story on Davos, though I rather thought he repeated himself a lot. How many different ways are there to say the mood of the country is on the up.
You hear it everywhere. The Cyril Spring, first coined right here ladies and gentlemen, is the new black. The stock market is stuck well above 60,000 points. The rand is strong. Foreigners were most impressed with Cyril.
But there’s just this nagging feeling that if only Ramaphosa could now persuade Jacob Zuma to avail himself of the opportunity to depart the Union Buildings gracefully everything would fall into place.
That’s probably a little unfair on Ramaphosa who did, after all, tell people (Bloomberg TV to be precise) that moving Zuma on was a “very, very delicate matter”, which is another way of preparing all of us for at least the following four things.
First, Zuma will deliver the state of the nation address at the opening of parliament next month.
Second, he’ll be back to answer questions about his address.
Third, he’ll probably also reshuffle his cabinet at least one more time. It seems the police may be close to charging Mosebenzi Zwane for his role in stealing public funds from a dairy project in the Free State. Getting rid of Zwane will do Zuma absolutely no harm at all and it will offer him an opportunity to extend a little useful patronage. How about a cabinet job for Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma?
Fourth (and by now we’re in March or even April), while Zuma appreciates he may be an electoral liability he genuinely doesn’t understand why, so he doesn’t see why he should stand down at least until the 2019 election campaign starts.
One answer to that would be to name the election date a year in advance, like this afternoon for instance. But then you’d have to start campaigning. But you can’t if you’re the ANC because the ANC is broke. It doesn’t have the money to start — let alone complete — an election campaign. It is going to have to schlenter money from somewhere. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
So I was thinking about how this begins to look in a few months. Ramaphosa still has this delicate problem (and he isn’t making it up; it is delicate) “transitioning” Zuma. It isn’t quite done. Zuma acolytes in the ANC top six like Jessie Duarte and Ace Magashule embarrass Ramaphosa at will.
Ramaphosa, in the meantime, is still repeating what he said in Davos — that things are, you know, looking up. The judicial inquiry into state capture will be hearing sensational evidence. The Guptas will have appeared before the parliamentary inquiry into same and might even appear for the judicial inquiry.
So Ramaphosa will have some victories. There may be arrests too, even of a Gupta brother or two. Brian Molefe and Anoj Singh may face criminal prosecution together. It is unlikely the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), and whoever leads it, will make the same mistake twice, having stuffed up all those years ago by not putting Zuma and Schabir Shaik in the dock for the same trial.
April will pass. The leaves on Johannesburg’s trees will begin to turn red and brown and fall to the ground. It will get colder in May. By June we will all be waiting with our hearts in our throats to see Cape Town’s famous winter rainfall arrive.
And Zuma will still be in the Union Buildings. In theory, by June, he could still be there for more than a year as the election date can be stretched into August next year.
The cold fact is that while there are mechanisms to remove Zuma, Ramaphosa desperately wants to avoid them because he cannot calculate the consequences of dividing the party more than it already is. So there will be no recall by the NEC. If there’s to be a vote of no-confidence it’ll have to come from the opposition and the ANC might even oppose it.
What Ramaphosa wants is for Zuma to go of his own free will. That is best for the party and best for Ramaphosa. The country comes third or fourth here.
But if you were Zuma, your free will would be screaming at you to stay in office for as long as you can. The moment you leave office you are powerless. Not that you have to fear Ramaphosa acting directly against you. What you have to fear is Ramaphosa appointing professionals to run our security and judicial agencies and simply not interfering with them.
“Sorry Jacob but it’s out of my hands,” is a sentence from Ramaphosa you want to delay forever.
So he sits there, calculating while the rest of us wait. There’s not much more obvious harm he can do but time is his friend now. A week is a long time in politics. Zuma is biding his time. Someone somewhere will make a mistake. That, at least, is the theory.
The reality is more in Ramaphosa’s sphere. Assume Zuma stays in office until the election next year. Imagine it’s until the end of July 2019. Then Ramaphosa becomes president (whenever the election I reckon Ramaphosa is going to walk it). Then in December 2022 the ANC holds another leadership election. Ramaphosa loses to a surprise run by David Mabuza. Come January 2023 the issue of two centres of power comes up. The new NEC decides to recall Ramaphosa with immediate effect.
He leaves the Union Buildings on Tuesday January 17 2023, having been in office for just 40 months.
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