Ramaphosa is Zondo’s final, feckless villain

NRamaphosa ... emerges from the report as slippery, indecisive and vague to the point of dishonesty

ow that the final volumes of the commission of inquiry into state capture are in, following the work of chief justice Raymond Zondo and a huge team, we have a broad idea of the truth. Sure, former spy boss Arthur Fraser is despicable but we knew that way back. We know Jacob Zuma is a thief but we knew that too. And the same for the rest of them. Before they were in the Zondo reports, they were in the newspapers, way before the so-called Gupta e-mails emerged in 2017.

What we didn’t know, for sure, was how culpable President Cyril Ramaphosa was in the entire affair. Zondo’s final report makes it clear that Ramaphosa felt he had no choice but to continue as deputy head of state so he could “resist” state capture “from within ”— but the story doesn’t stand if you read the bits about Ramaphosa.

“In my view,” says Zondo, “he [Ramaphosa] should have spoken out. I accept that it may be difficult to choose between the option [of] keeping quiet and keeping quiet and resisting.” But, he adds: “It would be untenable to send a message that if the same scenario were to happen again some time in the future, the right thing is not to speak out.”

If any reputational damage is done at the end by Zondo it is to Ramaphosa, who emerges from the report as slippery, indecisive and vague to the point of dishonesty. Zondo and his team did not push Ramaphosa hard enough on the two occasions he gave testimony on state capture and can thus make no finding against him.

Ramaphosa claims his strategy helped reverse the appointment of Des van Rooyen as finance minister, but even that is debatable. Business or the markets would have been just as effective. In fact, says Zondo, Ramaphosa’s insistence that he was resisting from within “suffers from his inability to provide any further examples of resistance”. Ouch.

But while he suffers no “finding” for failing to call out the corruption around him (this while he is head of the ANC’s powerful deployment committee, which conveniently took no minutes), on any reading of Zondo the president is deeply compromised.

Throughout the report his line is that he didn’t know state capture was happening until slapped in the face with it. The Gupta wedding, Fikile Mbalula warning he had been told what his next job was. None of these raised any serious suspicion in Ramaphosa’s mind. They were mere ‘signposts’ that something might have been up and he went along with them.

It was the sacking of Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister in 2015 that finally proves to him that state capture had reached “new heights”. This is puzzling. By the beginning of 2015 we’re supposed to understand he barely knew it existed.

The fact is that his decision not to risk being fired as deputy president by Zuma was poor. Zuma could not have fired him as deputy head of the ANC and he would have been rich enough still to win the top party job in 2017. And he continues to make poor decisions. Fraser, as he now knows, to run correctional services? Really? David Mahlobo, former intelligence minister and Zuma bagman, sits in Ramaphosa’s cabinet?

The problem is that having risked his reputation hunkering down inside a criminal organisation in the hope of reforming it after the burglary, Ramaphosa squandered his moment, introducing a few insipid reforms too late and too slowly, instead of decisively exiting the feculent political pit he inherited.

We were promised a single malt but what we got was cream soda. Ask PPC, the country’s biggest cement producer, which should now be riding a wave of Ramaphosa-inspired infrastructure development. Except there’s nothing. This past week it reported an annual loss. So much for protective tariffs and localisation.

Ramaphosa now gets four months to respond to Zondo’s findings. As always, he will do so first as leader of the ANC and then as leader of the country. That’s politics. Ahead of the ANC’s December elective conference there will be posturing and ringing declarations of change. Ignore them all. The sly work of ANC cadre deployment, our true cancer, will continue, Zondo calling it illegal and unconstitutional notwithstanding. The ANC can’t live without it.

Fortunately, the ANC’s time as undisputed leader of society is up. It will soon be in grubby coalitions at every level of government. There’ll be chaos and Ramaphosa might even prefer to retire to game farming.

SA is a country very different from the one Ramaphosa became leader of when Zuma stepped down in 2018. We’ve had enough. All of us.