Nothing good can come of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s predicament in the wake of a report from three jurists saying that they believe there is prima facie evidence that he acted improperly, and offended the constitution, in his response to the theft of an as yet unknown amount of dollars (Ramaphosa says the amount was $580,000 but there’s no way of proving this) from his Limpopo game farm, Phala Phala.
Having considered resigning after the report emerged last Wednesday, he has since been persuaded to fight back. The report, it seems widely agreed, was poorly thought out and merely repeated the story as first alleged by a powerful political foe, former intelligence boss Arthur Fraser.
Ramaphosa attended an ANC national executive committee (NEC) meeting on Monday and won the day, ahead of a final sitting of parliament on Tuesday, which was to decide whether to vote for the establishment of an inquiry which could result in his impeachment. Given that the NEC had decided to oppose the report, it is safe to assume efforts to move towards impeachment this week would fail.
What was interesting about both Monday and Tuesday was Ramaphosa’s intent. He doesn’t want the inquiry, even though there’s more than a fair chance it would clear him rather than impeach him. He simply doesn’t want to explain what the money was doing at the farm. It is, we have to assume, a story too ghastly to tell.
And that’s a big problem. What could have been explained months, even years ago, had Ramaphosa had any interest in leadership, is now what people call a “shitshow”, an omnishambles in which, even if Ramaphosa escapes inquiry, or if he doesn’t but escapes impeachment, or even if he resigns now, many of the ethical and institutional strands of the state he tried to repair in the wake of Jacob Zuma’s openly criminal administrations are again broken.
This time they’ve been broken by Ramaphosa himself. He took an extraordinary risk in deciding not to place Phala Phala in a blind trust. This is a farm to which exceedingly wealthy people come to buy disease-free wild animals. In the case of Hazim Mustafa, a Sudanese football club owner now said to be living in Dubai, he paid for the animals he bought at Phala Phala in cash while Ramaphosa was out of the country.
But the president would know this man. As deputy to Zuma, Ramaphosa spent an enormous amount of time in Sudan trying, one presumes, to broker peace between north and south. Mustafa has apparently not yet picked up his assets, which aroused much suspicion among the panel. Now it seems he wants his money back. And why not? He has no experience keeping animals disease free. My guess is that the president will now have to sell them on to some other Rolls-Royce-owning magnate with a trophy wife and a taste for a bit of bush.
The risk Ramaphosa took is in the cash. Why allow cash payments? Was Mustafa the first? If not, it doesn’t matter what the executive or the National Assembly thinks.
Because the fact is that Ramaphosa — once the stout, principled and saintly defender of the neutrality and independence of the Reserve Bank, and the good name of the South African Revenue Service (Sars), the Hawks and the National Prosecuting Authority — has damaged them all.
What does Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago, one of the world’s most respected central bankers, do now? He has a team looking into the foreign exchange implications of the burglary at Phala Phala. What, they will be asking, was the money doing there, how did it get there and why did their Stout Defender not tell them about it?
It’s no struggle to spell out the implications for the Bank, which was, under Zuma, deliberately pulled into politics. It will, whatever the outcome of its “probe”, be drawn into the thick of a political battle to which there is potentially no end as the many factions of the ANC battle for control of the party. In the process, Kganyago will be pulled from his high tower and be forced to tell the public why he has found that Ramaphosa has no questions to answer with regard to the dollars stolen from inside a couch in 2020, or why he should. Either way, he makes political enemies neither he, nor the country, can afford.
The Bank is literally the last institution of the sovereign still standing with its reputation wholly intact. The rest are either trying to repair damage or falling apart. When foreign institutions like the World Bank lend South Africa money these days, they deposit it with the Reserve Bank, not the government.
Rather, the central sin of Ramaphosa’s presidency has been negligence. He is inattentive and vague in the extreme
Much the same faces Ed Kieswetter at Sars, which he is rebuilding as an incorruptible stronghouse of fiscal rectitude, impervious to the politics of the day. But Sars will have to audit Phala Phala, if not Ramaphosa himself. If it finds the farm and the owner are clean, who will believe it? If it finds the farm or the owner not clean, what happens then?
The police role in this has already been thoroughly discredited, also largely thanks to the president, who casually asked his head of security, a general in the SAPS, to investigate it on his own.
“Stupid is not a good enough reason to impeach a sitting president,” tweeted the campaigning lawyer Richard Spoor on Monday. “Stealing and corruption is. Cyril is not a thief, nor is he corrupt.” This is true.
Rather, the central sin of Ramaphosa’s presidency has been negligence. He is inattentive and vague in the extreme and he assumes that decisions taken in his presence are somehow magically executed in his absence. They are often not.
It is one of the reasons, over this Christmas period and into next year, that you will see people he has collected around him start to peel away. Not politicians but citizens of the quality of Daniel Mminele, former deputy governor at the Bank and now the president’s climate finance chief; Valli Moosa, former minister under Nelson Mandela and now deputy chair of the presidential climate commission; and former Exxaro CEO and Sasol chair Sipho Nkosi, supposedly trying to clear red tape surrounding the president’s grand plans for the economy.
It goes without saying that after Ramaphosa has done nothing to shut his energy minister up with his endless public criticisms of Eskom and its management, André de Ruyter will pack his bags too. Who needs this nonsense?
And so the second Ramaphosa era, assuming he wins re-election at the ANC conference in two weeks, will start with something of an unravelling. He is toxic now, through his own lack of common sense. People will avoid him.
Ramaphosa’s legal team has lodged papers with the Constitutional Court, taking the panel’s report on review. In its current state it seems unlikely to withstand much scrutiny. But that will not mean Ramaphosa is home free. The farm burglary has thrown into sharp relief a sloppy and mildly chaotic background to an otherwise carefully scripted presidency. No interviews, no explanations, no accounting to anyone.
From now on, that all gets a lot harder to pull off. Ramaphosa in a second term will be more, rather than less, dependent on obsolete ministers like Gwede Mantashe and Ebrahim Patel. His tenure, judging from branch nominations for membership of the NEC, is going to be more tenuous than it is now. And if you appreciate the degree to which Ramaphosa has been hobbled to the point of immobility by the current balance of power in the ANC, it hardly bears thinking how little room he will have in the future.
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