PETER BRUCE: Cyril’s New Dawn a slow riser

My Twitter account is endlessly amusing and informative. Yesterday someone I follow tweeted — after a fuss was being made about VBS Bank being taken into curatorship — that “On Twitter you can be anything you like. Today we were bank regulation experts. What a time to be alive.” And then he added a smiley face.

But it’s so true. Throw away the encyclopaedias, we South Africans already know everything. Nothing is complex anymore and if you’re not already familiar with all 52 forms of gender or sexual identity, well then you should jolly well be ashamed of yourself.

As far as knowing everything, VBS Bank is a lovely example. Most people only ever heard of it when, under pressure from the constitutional court to pay back some of the public money that had been spent on Nkandla, former president Jacob Zuma borrowed about R7.8m from VBS. That “BS” in the name, though, should be a dead giveaway. It is, or was, a building society, not a fully fledged bank and thus broke the law when it took deposits from municipalities. Local governments are not allowed to deposit money with mutual societies like VBS, yet VBS happily took their money.

And then, when treasury ordered those municipalities to place their funds with more secure banks, VBS collapsed. It’s complex but, hey, let’s simplify it quick, quick. There’s a fight, with even the deeply expert EFF, after carefully studying the VBS balance sheet and loan accounts, deciding that Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago and his team had unfairly picked on the country’s only black-owned bank. I’m sure Kganyago will have been mortified to have been found out so quickly. But seriously, what sort of a bank lends against a PTO (permission to occupy, a normally short-term rolling lease)? Should any municipality be paying salaries out of accounts held with such an institution?

It was a busy weekend. President Cyril Ramaphosa, on a voter registration drive in Olievenhoutbosch near Midrand warned people trying to occupy land there illegally that if they continued to try they would find out that government would show them that, well, they could not. He also invited the EFF to rejoin the ANC, an appeal that hugely amused the EFF before they told Ramaphosa to go away.

Sadly, while Ramaphosa was wagging a finger at land invaders near Midrand and trying to woo the EFF back to the ANC, elsewhere in government some serious stuff was going down. The Hawks and the National Prosecuting Authority and the SA Revenue Service’s efforts to do something really nasty to former Sars acting commissioner Ivan Pillay finally came to a head when Pillay and other supposed members of a Sars “rogue unit” were close to being charged. This is old Zuma stuff. Not Ramaphosa “new dawn” stuff.

That fact is that Tom Moyane, of whom I have heard a former Sars commissioner say “he knows bugger-all about tax” is still Sars commissioner. You’d think that would amount in and of itself to a downgradable event. But Cyril’s New Dawn is a slow riser. There’ll be a commission of inquiry into why Sars, under Moyane, has so far missed around R80bn in revenue. If there’s a result this time next year I’ll eat my hat.

There seems to be so much low-hanging fruit for Ramaphosa and yet he seems so reluctant to pick it. Shaun Abrahams at the NPA should not be in his position a day longer than necessary. Same with Moyane and Arthur Fraser over at the State Security Agency. But just wander through a newspaper ...

Apparently the Guptas have multiple passports. How do you get that? In other words, Atul Gupta will have three or four SA passports, each with a different number. I have never heard of such largesse from home affairs. Even more interesting, news reports say the Gupta brothers will appear this week, along with Jacob Zuma’s son and their former business partner, Duduzane Zuma, before the parliamentary inquiry into state capture.

In the unlikely even that these appearances actually take place, could someone call the national commissioner of police and get them to at least remove all passports in the Guptas’ possession and Duduzane’s as well. They are a flight risk.

Home affairs minister Malusi Gigaba’s apparent warning that he may strip Ajay Gupta of his permanent residency is easily the emptiest threat I have ever heard of. Why bother? He’s not going to be here anyway and he can move in and out of SA on his Indian passport like a true Brics brother.

The Moyanes, the Abrahamses, they’re there for the taking as your “interim” administration approaches the 2019 elections.

Sadly, taking on the Guptas in any serious way would be fatal for Gigaba and a host of other South Africans as well because, trust me, Atul in particular, if he is detained and ever put on trial, will squeal like the spoilt baby he is.

And when will arrests be made in the listeriosis debacle? Probably never, if the response to the Life Esidimeni tragedy is anything to go by. Included in the Ramaphosa entourage this past voter registration weekend was one Qedani Mahlangu, the Gauteng MEC for health when the Esidimeni disgrace was conceived of and executed.

Come on Mr President, cheer us up some more. Remove some of these public sector slugs from office. They’re just officials anyway. It’s flick of the wrist stuff.

Sadly for us, Mr President, I suspect you may actually have a bit of a plan finally forming. The Moyanes, the Abrahamses, they’re there for the taking as your “interim” administration approaches the 2019 elections. They’ll go when their removal scores you most points, when you’ve had your many summits. The DA is suddenly at war with itself and has slipped in its own polling. The EFF cannot make headway in rural areas and its pledge to nationalise the land will put a ceiling on its expansion in towns and cities.

So let’s do a deal. Take Abrahams, Gigaba, Moyane, Fraser. Take one off the board in the next week or so. Just one. My choice, if I had only one, would be Abrahams at the NPA. Let him go. Cut him loose. Set him free. I’m sure there’ll be dozens of law firms waiting to scoop him up.

And then make true the rumours that you are talking to Glynnis Breytenbach about the NDPP job. She’d be quite terrifying as a replacement for Abrahams. Even some of her DA colleagues would be glad to see the back of her.

She would, in other words, be perfect.