PETER BRUCE: The reshuffle: Cyril gets it half right

OK folks, so after the euphoria, the reality. President Cyril Ramaphosa looked absolutely shattered last night when, after breaking a promise to us all for the first time (and guaranteed, with the ANC around him, not the last) he started an announcement late. Just as he thought he had a reshuffle ready to run something happened. It took an hour and a half to sort it out.

What was it? We’ll never know but I’ll bet at least one Zupta accomplice to state capture — Bathabile Dlamini, Malusi Gigaba or Nomvula Mokonyane — got to stay in cabinet because of it. The official excuse was that Ramaphosa was still trying to get people on the phone because, you know, he’s too nice a guy to let people find out in the media that they’ve been fired.

Trouble on the phone wasn’t the look he was wearing on his face when he finally appeared. What he was wearing was more like a kid who gets caught doing something really bad by the neighbours. He looked guilty, hesitant and rushed. He couldn’t wait to get out of there and sped from the room the moment he stopped speaking. No walks with Ramaphosa last night. No chats. Nothing.

I and other commentators have already written that this reshuffle was never going to be perfect. There are some choices you just hold your nose and make. It keeps the party settled. Keeping Dlamini must have been excruciating for Ramaphosa. He could not have found a more menial job to give her and, what’s more, it’s in the presidency, along with Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, his leadership rival who gets to do whatever Collins Chabane and Jeff Radebe had to do before. Not a lot.

But I think there’s method to Ramaphosa’s madness, even if the cabinet he announced last night isn’t anywhere nearly as good as it could have been. He seems to have evolved a dual tactic of keeping his enemies (including DD Mabuza who becomes deputy president, another job without much content unless Ramaphosa puts some in) close in government and his friends close in the party structures.

That’s a smart thing to do. He can watch government but he needs eyes and ears he can trust in party headquarters at Luthuli House.

And when you think about it, Nhlanhla Nene back at finance, Pravin Gordhan at public enterprises, Jeff Radebe at energy and even Gwede Mantashe at minerals is a pretty damned good team. Ebrahim Patel stays at economic development and Rob Davies at trade & industry so control of the economic cluster is complete once more and in the right hands (even if you disagree with aspects of some of the policy coming out of these departments the people running them have great integrity).

What they all need now is leadership and that is going to have to come from Ramaphosa. We need quick wins. We need money and growth and they are there for the asking if we look in the right places.

In one of the right places, sadly, Ramaphosa has stumbled badly. By returning Malusi Gigaba to home affairs from national treasury he is putting a cork back in a bottle of money and fiscal relief unimaginable under Zuma. Gigaba will have to face his own demons when Judge Raymond Zondo’s commission of inquiry into state capture begins. And my suggestion in a column about a week ago that Ramaphosa relieve Gigaba of any political responsibilities right now and send him to Harvard University to actually learn something useful has been cruelly ignored.

It is an appointment Ramaphosa will regret. Not that Gigaba poses a political threat. It is simply that he keeps being given jobs he knows nothing about. Finance was obviously the high point of this trajectory and that, thankfully, is over. But home affairs is an absolutely critical ministry, or department. Giving it back to Gigaba is borderline reckless.

It may be a wider failing in the ANC but Gigaba, especially, seems to view home affairs as a tool with which to keep people out of the country rather than to welcome them in. It was because he could not grasp the scale of fiscal good that tourism could bring SA that he spent so much time defending the harsh visa restrictions put in place in his first term as head of the ministry.

And, by the way, to all the radio and Twitter comments I’ve been listening to and reading, it wasn’t at home affairs that Gigaba first started doing the Guptas favours. It was long before that, when he was public enterprises minister. But home affairs did lean over backwards to help the Guptas out while Gigaba was minister there. There’s a fabulous new book coming out any day now which will detail the disgraceful arrangements by which the Guptas were able to organise dozens of work permits for Indian nationals to come out here and help set up their TV station, ANN7. Let’s hope Judge Zondo will have read the book by the time Gigaba enters the witness stand at the inquiry.

The thing is, tourism is an export (thank God Derek Hanekom is back there). It is arguably our most valuable foreign exchange earner. And we don’t have to move anything anywhere to get it. All we have to do is be nice to tourists, protect them and they’ll come back again and again.

Gigaba is often falsely blamed for the visa and birth certificate debacle. In fact, those regulations had already been gazetted when he first became home affairs minister. They were the brainchild of his predecessor, Naledi Pandor. His error was to defend them as foolishly as he did.

The big thing, I remember, was child smuggling, which pales into insignificance when measured against our desperate need now for money, when the police, better led, could create special units to track people smugglers and put them in jail and when, in Engcobo, in Transkei, last week, a “church” is discovered with dozens of hostage children in it, deprived of education, probably sexually abused, about which the entire community already seems to know and which lies just 3km from a police station.

Give me a break. If Gigaba (or his boss) has any sense we will immediately can the birth certificate nonsense and allow visitors to SA to simply arrive and get a 30-day visa at their point of entry. What we also need is a five to 10-year programme of skilled immigration. From wherever. Skills can only be transferred person to person and we have clearly run out of them.

I won’t be holding my breath though. Gigaba will do nothing sensible at home affairs and the Ramaphosa way is obviously to play a long and slow game. He wants two terms, plus the 18 months he has until an election must be held. So there will be many tense moments, like last night, as thieves and enemies try to trip him up.

My only real ask for the moment is that he now quickly gets the right people running the SA Revenue Service, the National Prosecuting Authority, Crime Intelligence and the Hawks and that he sets them free from the conspiracy that has held our country by the throat for the past 10 years.

And that, when colleagues and politicians and other grandees and elites run to him because the taxman or the police are on their case he can simply hold up his hands, look sympathetic, and tell them he can’t interfere. Could we do all that next week please Mr President?