Depending on where you stand, either President’s Cyril Ramaphosa’s address to the nation on Sunday night was assertive, empathetic, gracious and generous; or he is a cynical, two-faced snake and a liar. As Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in the UK election last year taught us, never confuse Twitter with your country.
The coronavirus and nine-week lockdown (sprung on us at almost no notice) have us all strung out, but I couldn’t help reminding myself after he had finished that he is basically a decent man in an impossible position. What he did on Sunday night was go about as far out on a limb as I’ve seen him go. If we misbehave from June 1, when we can move around freely, fly a bit, replenish the whisky cupboard and drive around at night, we will only have ourselves to blame if the infection begins to spread even more quickly than it is.
People who assume that it was easy for Ramaphosa, that there’s some giant conspiracy behind his every move, are just plain wrong. He would finally have had to hold up a palm to Bheki Cele, Ebrahim Patel and Aaron Motsoaledi, all of whom supported his run for the ANC leadership against Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma in December 2017.
She, in fact, is the only one of the securocrats left holding a little of the power he gave them all at the start of this crisis, a forlorn Camel Light. Cele’s leadership of the police, given his shot at power, amounted to rank abuse. Patel will forever kick himself for the silly rules corner he painted himself into because he couldn’t simply explain that he was just trying to reduce the numbers of people in the shops. Motsoaledi helped put his boss under pressure (over cigarettes) when he least needed it and he isn’t shooting the lights out at home affairs.
Ramaphosa, not unreasonably, sees his No1 job as leading the government. They’re his team, for better or (too often) worse. Then party, then country. He tried, in the pandemic, to give his senior ministers some real clout and many let him and themselves down. On Sunday night he made no reference to the national command council, which has been running the state of disaster we have been in since mid-March.
The move to level 3 lockdown, the lifting of the curfew, the all-day movement, the lifting of the alcohol ban and the effort to draw a line in the sand in the war on Prof Glenda Gray and to include even the big metro “hotspots” in level 3 were all decisions, Ramaphosa said, of his cabinet. Not the national coronavirus command council, where Dlamini Zuma, as minister of co-operative governance & traditional affairs, has considerable administrative power.
But like I say, we’re strung out and angry. All that, and the health system is still not nearly ready for what the virus is going to throw at it. Whose fault is that? Ramaphosa knows exactly how incapable the state that he runs is. He may even slightly prefer it that way because he knows its instincts are authoritarian. Imagine the trouble we’d be in if it were also efficient.
As it is, we have an opportunity now to try once more to save ourselves. We beat the odds to win the Rugby World Cup last year, for crying out loud. How did that happen? This virus will kill a lot of us and I think Ramaphosa and his colleagues have finally understood there’s not much more they can do to stop it. It’s going to be awful. So let your heart bleed for the sick and the dying. It isn’t their fault and it isn’t yours.
Weep for them and weep for your country if you still love it. I was very moved by this Roger Cohen column the other day in The New York Times, especially where he quotes the German president, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War 2 without even attempting to sidestep his country’s terrible past. His country, he says, can only be loved with a broken heart.
Ours too. Like the Germany he tries to embrace, we battle to come to terms with our own country. We fight and argue and accuse and insult. About everything. I know I have allowed my own rage about the things done to me and my family by the Guptas to colour some of my writing about Dlamini Zuma, once their candidate for the presidency. I’m better than that.
But you see a version of the same temper in the call by the former acting director-general of the department of health, Anban Pillay, that Gray, president and CEO of the SA Medical Research Council (SAMRC), and chairperson of the research subcommittee on the ministerial advisory committee (MAC) for the coronavirus, a scientist of global stature, be “investigated” for commenting to the media that the lockdown was no longer serving any purpose. Her immediate boss on the MAC has said as much a number of times, as have many others. The board of the SAMRC has formally apologised for her remarks.
That is just madness and it’ll end up being Ramaphosa or health minister Zweli Mkhize trying quietly to persuade Gray to stay on in her job. The most eloquent thing Mkhize could do now is to remove the entire board of the SAMRC and replace them with people with some moral backbone. Mkhize has so far had a “good” epidemic, but becoming embroiled on the wrong side of a row about the suppression of scientific opinion will do him damage.
As for Ramaphosa, as disappointing as his leadership often is, and risky though it might be to venture at this early stage, I suspect he will come out of this crisis stronger than he was going into it, the health and coming economic crises notwithstanding. He is being his cautious and often frustrating self, but for the moment it is the government, not the party, that occupies centre stage.
The level 3 he announced on Sunday was much more ambitious than I had expected. I’m still surprised, as alcohol is unbanned, that some version of the curfew did not survive. You surely want people who will be drinking not to be driving. At least not immediately. But he was true to what he promised – instead of trying to list a million things citizens can do, he sensibly turned the process on its head. We know now what we can’t do and it isn’t much.
A lot of what happens now is up to us. The Swedes kept their heads during their crisis and so can we. Keep your distance or pay the price.
Ramaphosa’s main job in the next few months is going to be persuading finance minister Tito Mboweni not to lose heart and leave. Dlamini Zuma will give way on cigarettes the next time we change levels, perhaps even before.
She cannot produce any hard evidence that smokers are being targeted by this virus. There isn’t any. If anything, the opposite is true and she has merely had a good run with her pet hate – a second bite of the cherry she so enjoyed when, as health minister, she stopped us smoking in restaurants.
Mboweni, though, is easily the most sensible and valuable minister in the cabinet. He does and says some truly cringeworthy things on Twitter, but he has learnt an enormous amount first as Reserve Bank governor and now, running the National Treasury.
He knows, as does any good entrepreneur, to check first thing in the morning how much money is left in the bank.
Together with Lesetja Kganyago at the Reserve Bank, Mboweni and the little-appreciated but (in my opinion) formidable Thoko Didiza at agriculture, land reform & rural development, plus Pravin Gordhan and Patel, Ramaphosa has a politically mature and composed team around him and a relatively easy run at a second term as ANC leader in about 30 months.
You may well throw up your hands in despair at that prospect, but the ANC, for the moment, is still the only game in town, however dismal its record. Now that the DA is no longer flirting with the EFF it may improve its electability, but it will be a slow recovery.
At the best of times SA is not an easy place to govern, but you look around at its many problems and there are so many easy fixes if we could only learn to value the expertise and commitment that we have. Fixing a pump to take the village sewage to a treatment plant is not hard. You just need to employ someone who knows how to fix the pump.
Ramaphosa spends too much time trying to will the world or our economy to change. They are already changing. What he needs to do is to find a hundred men and women who can fix pumps so people get clean water in or near their homes. It’s a dream for millions. Construct a million homes. A hundred hospitals, 10 new cities and a fast train from Joburg to Cape Town. Use the private sector to build and operate. Start an economic recovery so swift you simply cannot control every last wrinkle. Let South Africans go and you’ll be able to smell the energy and the growth.
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