If you happened to hear something discordant on Sunday, it may have been the thousand tiny violins playing for President Cyril Ramaphosa. An apposite backing track for a presidential pity party.
Speaking to the media after an ANC national executive committee meeting, Ramaphosa bemoaned the herculean task he’s been forced to shoulder; he has faced “possibly the most challenging period that any president in the democratic era has ever faced”.
Of course, Nelson Mandela might have something to say about that. But let’s set aside Ramaphosa’s presidential trappe van vergelyking. What he was really getting at is that his “new dawn” has been held back by factors not of his own making and entirely beyond his control. Woe is Cyril.
In fairness, Ramaphosa couldn’t possibly have seen Covid coming. But the other malignancies? State capture; the moribund economy; the July 2021 unrest. The construction mafias, filling the vacuum left by the retreating state. For those, he had a front-row seat.
Within this political pantomime you could, without straining the imagination, draw a line between state capture and the 2021 riots. You could draw it between state capture and the construction mafias. The economy. Even the corruption that gnawed at the government’s Covid response. But that would just be deflection.
The issue is that Ramaphosa’s picture is fundamentally ahistorical: it pretends there is no continuity between administrations. To park all ills at the gates of Nkandla is not only to give former president Jacob Zuma too much credit; it is also to ignore the fact that that a single party has manipulated the levers of state for almost 30 years. And this party is what is responsible for the confluence of crises constantly causing Ramaphosa such shock. For the pall of lawlessness that hangs over the country.
It’s deeply disingenuous for Ramaphosa to claim he didn’t see it coming. More accurate is that he did little to stop it
Ramaphosa’s is a curiously ahistorical picture of his own role too. Consider just the past decade: deputy president of the ruling party and chair of its cadre deployment committee (2012-2017); deputy president of the country and tasked with overseeing the turnaround of Eskom, SAA and the Post Office (2014-2018). And it’s not as though the ANC didn’t know about the creeping influence of the Guptas by then.
So that all turned out well.
In any event, it’s deeply disingenuous for Ramaphosa to claim he didn’t see it coming. More accurate is that he did little to stop it.
It’s not as if there was no opportunity — his leverage as deputy president, for a start. But other avenues too. In 2016, when the DA brought motions of no confidence against Zuma, Ramaphosa’s current antipathy for state capture was nowhere to be seen. He voted to keep Zuma in power — twice. That record of fecklessness stands in perpetuity — a blot of shame on two pages of Hansard.
And it’s by no means over. Ramaphosa cannot plausibly bewail a lack of reform if his cabinet coterie still includes those implicated in state capture; if it retains a veil of secrecy (Exhibit A: its refusal, still, to hand over full records of its cadre deployment committee); if it quibbles over the state capture report; if graft is still a government side hustle.
So much for inherited state capture, for open government, for a new dawn.
If Ramaphosa had been able to move beyond his “heavy is the head” hubris on Sunday, he might have heard something too: the dirge playing for South Africa.
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