Last Thursday, a friend and I went out for lunch to celebrate Freedom Day. He made a joke: “If you asked President Cyril Ramaphosa to choose between a salad and a steak for this lunch, what would he do? He would appoint a committee to make the decision for him.”
It’s not a funny joke, but sadly this is the president we have all painfully come to know. After the “nine wasted years” of former president Jacob Zuma, Ramaphosa has frittered away five precious years in policy incoherence, indecision, incompetence and elements of the corruption he vowed to eradicate.
Ramaphosa not only fails to lead, he cannot even choose a policy line, articulate it and implement it. He says an immoral and unethical thing one minute, and is contradicted by his own party the next. Eager to please dictators and democrats at the same time, he ends up pleasing no-one while attracting the scorn of all.
Last Tuesday Ramaphosa stood next to Finnish President Sauli Väinämö Niinistö and shamelessly announced that South Africa was pulling out of the International Criminal Court (ICC) because the body was “unfair” to some countries.
“The governing party, the ANC, has taken the decision that it is prudent that South Africa should pull out of the ICC largely because of the manner in which the ICC has been seen to be dealing with these types of problems,” he said.
The party that Ramaphosa leads, the ANC, then issued a statement reaffirming its resolution from December 2022 that it would remain a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the court. Hours later it was the job of presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya to sheepishly explain his boss’s gaffe as “an error in a comment”, whatever that means. Magwenya said: “The presidency wishes to clarify that South Africa remains a signatory to the Rome Statute and will continue to campaign for equal and consistent application of international law.”
Ramaphosa has largely dragged his feet and has allowed the moral and ethical dodginess of the Zuma years to return with a vengeance
Then, on Friday, Ramaphosa announced that he had appointed an interministerial committee to consider options regarding the ICC’s arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is due to attend the Brics summit in South Africa in August.
Ramaphosa seemingly has not even stopped to consider what the ICC’s charges against Putin are: the illegal deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia after Russia’s illegal invasion in February 2022.
In the first five years of Ramaphosa’s term as ANC president, many of us believed that because he had ascended to power on a thin margin, he was carefully working on entrenching himself and would become decisive once he had done this. At the ANC’s 2017 national conference Ramaphosa told his supporters that they shouldn’t worry about their loss of the general secretary position because his own election by a slim margin “gives us a beachhead” to fix the ANC. By that he meant he now had a toehold in the territory previously dominated by Zuma and that he would carve out advantages for his agenda from this slim majority.
In some small ways, he did. Some of the Zuma acolytes in the cabinet were shown the door — but a lot more stayed. Some of the captured institutions of accountability (such as the National Prosecuting Authority and the Hawks) were returned to men and women of integrity, but others remained. Some captured state-owned entities such as Eskom were also returned to credible leadership.
Yet, despite these victories, Ramaphosa has largely dragged his feet and has allowed the moral and ethical dodginess of the Zuma years to return with a vengeance. That would be somewhat understandable if he were implementing the reforms he claimed he would, but, sadly, he has now become immobilised. He cannot decide. He can’t lead. He is like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. Worse, he has now totally stopped even pretending to run the country. He issues instructions without applying his mind, his ministers are warring and he does not seem to know what he stands for in international diplomacy.
The ICC embarrassment is just the latest of a very long list in which Ramaphosa cannot make a decision. He appointed an electricity minister just so he wouldn’t need to confront Pravin Gordhan and Gwede Mantashe. Now the three are fighting.
Ramaphosa is failing the most important test of all: the leadership test. Literally in the hour of their greatest darkness, South Africans are leaderless.
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