So, the year has kicked off with a bang. President Cyril Ramaphosa, if we are to believe media reports, is under pressure to sack public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan and transfer responsibility for Eskom from the department of public enterprises (DPE) to the department of minerals & energy, where the minister is ANC chair Gwede Mantashe. Gordhan, it is argued, should take “political responsibility” for Eskom’s failure to keep its promise to Ramaphosa not to load-shed between December 11 and today.
On Friday Eskom chair Jabu Mabuza resigned in response to the failure. I guarantee you he is right now the happiest guy in the country. He was given an impossible job and tried his best. But in SA state-owned companies are run by the state — their board and managers are mere window dressing. Mabuza is well out of it.
In a state-owned company, managerial accountability cannot be the end of the story. Eskom is run from and by the DPE and it is quite right that Gordhan should come under pressure because of its consistent failures. He appointed a weak restructuring office (changing at the last moment from “officer” to a wider “office”) at Eskom in July. And in recommending Nampak CEO André de Ruyter to Ramaphosa as a new Eskom CEO in November he chose the weaker of De Ruyter and Andy Calitz, his main rival. Calitz was uppity. He wanted to meet Ramaphosa before taking the job. That was a demand too far but one the president may yet regret not affording him.
Gordhan did that (not alone, Mantashe was in on the interviews, as was Thoko Didiza) because Gordhan is a bit of a control freak. At the Treasury or before that at Sars, that might have been a positive quality. When you’re trying to turn complex companies around in complex situations you simply cannot do it all and if you can’t pick leaders good enough to go their own way without your constant meddling you’re going to end up in trouble.
Which is exactly where Gordhan is now — blithely unaware of the pressure building up around and against him. Even the wretched Bathabile Dlamini thinks Eskom should be run by Mantashe, which tells you what a terrible idea it is. Cosatu thinks so too. Heaven help De Ruyter, the new CEO, if it turns out he has to report to Uncle Gweezy. I wrote my Sunday Times column last Thursday and idly suggested Ramaphosa might consider swapping Gordhan and finance minister Tito Mboweni.
That way, I was thinking, Gordhan could go back to not financing corruption and working again with Sars (which he has done better than any finance minister since 2009) and Mboweni could carry out all the “reforms” he keeps tweeting about without having to actually do anything to implement them. At the DPE he could sell SAA, sell Eskom, sell Denel and we could all rejoice. Bet he wouldn’t.
Julius Malema was outraged by the thought of his nemesis, Gordhan, going back to the Treasury and unleashed a small army of EFF Twitter bots onto my account. It reminded me that getting rid of Gordhan is exactly what the EFF wants Ramaphosa to do. So do the remaining state capturers, led by Ace Magashule. What has happened now is that Ramaphosa’s ally, Cosatu, has joined the call. Mantashe would be an immediate beneficiary and the EFF would chalk up another victory. Ramaphosa is in a tight corner.
Even my friends thought the column was poor. Gareth van Onselen tweeted that I’d “expunged the past” in order to be able to write that Ramaphosa was being destroyed by his allies. Van Onselen’s point being that Ramaphosa has always known how rotten Eskom is.
Maybe, maybe not. I think he is genuinely naive at times. I don’t think he is a deliberate liar. A more powerful office, run by senior political actors, would help him but he is what he is — a nice guy trying to do the work of a brute and keep an anxious country and a sick and divided ANC afloat.
But the two are on different paths. I’ve always said this but, for obvious reasons, I get hammered a lot. A reader wrote in the Sunday Times recently that: “Each week Peter Bruce produces another example of how utterly useless the ANC is. Each week he neglects to tell us why he campaigned for them in this newspaper. What he reveals to us now as some great discovery, we all knew before the elections, and so must he.”
You have to respect letters that get to the point. Out of respect I’ll tell you again why I voted for Ramaphosa (and, yes, the ANC) in the past election.
It is easy to forget how evil Jacob Zuma’s administration was and it is too easy to write off Ramaphosa as a complicit bystander in everything Zuma did — the plunder and the neglect. Ramaphosa was abused, sneered at and insulted often by Zuma’s acolytes. He sucked it up so that he could turn things around. That, obviously, is happening not quite in the way we would all like.
And it is easy to forget that in the run-up to the election there was a real chance that the ANC vote could fall below 50% nationally and in provinces like Gauteng. It is also easy to forget that in Joburg, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth, the DA had, in the 2016 local elections, won enough votes to form loose coalition governments. Central to each coalition was the EFF.
The DA, then led by Mmusi Maimane, thought it could wriggle its way into coalitions if the ANC vote fell below 50%. So did the EFF under Malema. For me, letting the EFF into government is my line in the sand. The ANC may be a perilous choice. The EFF is much, much worse (yet Maimane chose to do business with it). Its policies would wreck this economy. They’re designed to. The choice was letting them get close to power or choose someone, Ramaphosa in my view then, who was trying, if not succeeding, to save it.
In the end, because of Maimane, the DA vote fell. The EFF vote rose and, fortunately for the country, Ramaphosa did enough to keep his head above water.
I’m not married to the guy. I haven’t seen him in a decade. But I’m happy the EFF didn’t make it into any government. So should you be. Had Ramaphosa not succeeded, do you really think the first party the ANC would have turned to for help would have been the DA? Seriously? Given what you know now?
No, it would immediately have seen the EFF slide into a partnership with the radical economic whatsit wing of the ANC (as it now has, anyway). Malema would now be (or be about to be) deputy president.
So I’m not sorry for my campaign for Ramaphosa last year. I’d do it again if the circumstances were the same. I’m not an ANC supporter. It is a useless, greedy and hopelessly corrupted organisation and I have known it since 1979. Its only strength is that apartheid lent it a legitimacy that even today withstands glaring daily evidence of its failures. But it will take more than evidence for the legitimacy to fade. Another 20 years? Settle for 40 to avoid disappointment.
It is both amusing and sad to watch the DA and good people like Helen Zille and John Steenhuisen begin to mobilise for the coming elections in the firm belief that black voters will look at a white leader and think: “Ja well, ok, things are so bad for me now, I’ll buy that.”
It isn’t going to happen. The DA is polling around 16% at the moment, half of what it was nearly three years ago. Black people are simply not going to vote for white people in enough numbers to make any kind of difference to our politics.
Is there a Plan B in the DA? I don’t mean another Maimane, parachuted in by Zille or whoever. Is there a black leader in the party who has done his or her time? Toiled for years on the ground for the DA where it’s uncomfortable, even dangerous, to do so? Steenhuisen is an estimable guy but he needs a strong opponent when the party elects a new leadership in April or May. DA members need to be able to make a clear choice in their leadership.
I ask because there is clearly now (I think) a moment arriving where a lively opposition might make headway against Ramaphosa. He sits at the start of the year with a clear dilemma — he is not bothered by Zuma or even Magashule, whatever other columnists might tell you. Magashule is going to jail and so is Zuma.
The president’s dilemma is that his own allies — Mantashe, Gordhan, Ebrahim Patel, Zweli Mkhize and Cosatu among them, are at odds. You see it most obviously with Eskom. Does he fire Gordhan, easily his most loyal minister? To an extent, Gordhan divides the party, or at least the cabinet. And if he gives in and moves Eskom to minerals & energy what will be the point of having a DPE? And what are the consequences of making Mantashe a kingmaker?
He already protects Ramaphosa in parliament and in the party and I doubt Ramaphosa could survive if Mantashe turned on him like he turned on Zuma. So you have to keep him in the tent, even at great cost to the economy. In politics, survival comes first. Boris Johnson knows it. Donald Trump does. Emmanuel Macron just showed he knows it by pulling pension reforms in France. Ramaphosa isn’t an outlier here.
Of course his first year has been disappointing. The country is in all kinds of trouble and he simply doesn’t have the political space to stop it. So, should he go? What then, if he does? Who gets the job?
I try to be grateful for small mercies. Ramaphosa may be politically weak but he seems to have got the Hawks, the revenue service and the National Prosecuting Authority going. Empowering and then letting go state institutions that can tackle and punish corruption is not a small thing. We are still members of the International Criminal Court. Our integrity, such as it is, is intact.
This year, while watching his back, he has to change the constitution to allow expropriation without compensation through parliament without further damaging the economy. It is probably the last thing he wants to do but the Zuma camp forced it though the 2017 elective conference in a rage after its candidate, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, lost narrowly to Ramaphosa.
Eskom has somehow to keep going (though if you can possibly afford it, buy some solar panels and some storage batteries and set them up wherever you are). He has to survive, in June, an ANC national general council (NGC) — normally a meeting called to ensure the government is doing what the party instructed it to when it elected the president; this one in December 2017.
It will be a stormy time and in the run-up some media will do their best to scare the living daylights out of you.
But Ramaphosa will survive the NGC. He’ll have done the land thing and the other big issue, the so-called “nationalisation” of the Reserve Bank, is more easily contained. He may also have to explain away why SAA could not be saved.
But make no mistake, the ANC is a largely insane political party with only the faintest grasp of economic, environmental or even psychological reality. It is apartheid’s parting gift to SA and there is no getting rid of it, not for a very long time.
Do what you have to do.
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