It is almost two years to the day that President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered his inaugural state of the nation address (Sona). It has been a trying two years for South Africans. Unemployment is at its highest ever — nearly 40% of South Africans are unemployed according to the expanded definition; this in a country which has long been counted among the most unequal societies in the world.
Economic growth is dismal, load-shedding is the norm, corruption allegations have long lost their shock value, government debt is rising, and South Africans are becoming poorer.
The latest SA household net wealth index by Momentum and Unisa showed that the real net wealth of households declined by about R237bn between the second and third quarters of 2019.
Populists are on the rise. The EFF increased its electoral support again in the 2019 general election, and in a recent by-election in the North West support for the party more than doubled.
The fifth column inside the ANC is hellbent on undermining Ramaphosa’s reform project.
This group, along with the EFF, is on the march, attempting to tar Ramaphosa with the same brush as former president Jacob Zuma by moving to disrupt his opening of parliament in a bid to force his hand to exercise his constitutional prerogative to hire and fire.
Part of the aim is that if South Africans see Ramaphosa treated as a constitutional delinquent — like his predecessor in fact was — citizens will come to believe that Ramaphosa and Zuma are the same, and the same fate should befall the incumbent: removal from office.
In politics perception is everything — but it won’t work. South Africans are keenly aware that Ramaphosa and Zuma are vastly different beings.
What Ramaphosa was entrusted with by the majority of citizens in the 2019 election was to fix what his party and his predecessor had destroyed.
Zuma broke the 1994 social contract.
Under his watch, institutions painstakingly built over the preceding decade and a half and more were demolished in less than five years — think the SA Revenue Service, Eskom, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), the Hawks, the police, the National Treasury. Very few institutions survived.
What was broken under Zuma was also the notion of truth — he ushered in post-truth politics in SA long before it took hold across the globe. It was not only the state that buckled under the weight of his presidency, but the ANC and the congress movement itself.
Cosatu split, the ANC Youth League was destroyed, the ANC itself split twice in the first five years of his presidency. If the past two years were a nightmare, the past 10 were hellish. It is from that lost decade which the country is now attempting to recover.
While Ramaphosa indeed has a mammoth task in a near impossible political environment, his own conduct too has been found wanting of late. A key example is his undermining of the business rescue process at SAA, which his government had put in place.
Whatever Ramaphosa announces in his Sona will mean little unless his words are matched with action — as they were after his first opening of parliament two years ago. At an SA National Editors’ Forum event after that first Sona, Ramaphosa declared: "I don’t want to be lionised as a great man who killed a bear on the Arctic circle and all that. No, you’ve got to work with people and respect them."
It’s time for Ramaphosa to shed this approach and recognise that what SA needs to halt the slide is in fact a "great man" who can and does slay a bear in the Arctic circle.
The citizens who placed their trust in him in the polls last year deserve nothing less.
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