You can hear both the desperate wailing and the gleeful chortling from various corners of the nation. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s new dawn is under siege and those who want him to succeed are weeping or in deep doubt about his project. Meanwhile his detractors are licking their chops like hyenas and rubbing their paws together. They perceive weakness. They smell blood.
Everywhere one looks there is strong resistance to the former trade unionist and businessman. Just over a month into his first full term he is fighting fires on every front.
The best members of Ramaphosa’s cabinet are on the ropes. Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan faces an attack on social media every day from many within the ANC itself. The opposition, particularly the EFF, says loudly and often that they want him out. Public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane is inexplicably obsessed with the matter of Gordhan. She is working like an Energizer bunny to find him responsible for some or other wrongdoing. Her abundant energy is sadly not apparent in other, glaringly serious, matters such as the Vrede dairy farm case.
Ramaphosa’s supporters are at each others’ policy throats. The ANC in Gauteng bared its fangs last week, insulting and denigrating finance minister Tito Mboweni in various tweets. Mboweni posted his own ripostes. These are people who meet virtually every week and whose contact numbers are available to each other with no effort.
Meanwhile the state capture crowd is emboldened. Virtually everyone who stole taxpayers’ money, acted corruptly at state-owned enterprises by opening doors for the Guptas and the Trillians of this world, is holding press conferences and telling us that everything is hunky-dory.
The Zuma crowd are not nice people, and if they upend Ramaphosa we are in extremely dangerous waters
Last week a disgraced former minister in Jacob Zuma’s cabinet, Faith Muthambi, was appointed to head a parliamentary portfolio committee. She told reporters that she is "fit and proper" for the job. I am being serious. This is the same person who is credibly accused of sending confidential cabinet minutes to the Guptas. This is the same person who is credibly accused of lying to parliament when she testified at the inquiry into the crisis at the SABC. "Fit and proper" my behind, as they say in the US.
All these setbacks are fuelling a sense of disappointment among many. My good friend, and a revered political analyst, Aubrey Matshiqi, tweeted the other day that it feels like the new dawn is turning into a "false dawn".
Matshiqi is wise and often right. But I am not sure if it is time for the long faces and the doomsday scenarios — yet. It doesn’t help that the sword of a vote of no confidence is hanging over Ramaphosa due to the same public protector’s energetic actions to find him guilty of wrongdoing on the Bosasa matter.
First, did we expect the Zuma-Ace Magashule state capture crowd to acquiesce? No, these are desperate people in a desperate bid to stay out of jail. They will fight within the ANC, within the EFF (where they have proxies who are as guilty as they are in the state capture saga), in society (remember that proxies in the media, business and all sorts of other places helped the Zuma-ites execute their nefarious plans) and anywhere else they can. Their most potent weapon: the argument that they are allegedly standing up for the black man, while in truth they are looting from the poor (black) man and woman.
The Ramaphosa ethos is SA’s last-chance saloon. If the Zuma crowd upends him and his cohort over the short to medium term they will ensure that the 2024 election is rigged (in their favour) and they remain in power in the years beyond.
They will get to work in seriousness. What Zuma did to the institutions, state-owned enterprises and to society will be like a picnic. We will well and truly be in the Magashule doctrine of governance: politicians will steal, health will collapse, the judiciary will be undermined, the fiscus will collapse and the 30 broke municipalities will multiply.
These are not nice people. They must not win. If the new dawn is false then we are in extremely dangerous waters.
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