Ramaphosa’s long game is over

Obituaries, I suspect, are in order. Whether President Cyril Ramaphosa resigns or stays is immaterial. Writing about him in the past tense is not an error. He’s probably toast — the fate of all well-meaning nice guys. The long game has caught up with him. The smart alecs among his supporters were telling us it was the mind of a shrewd strategist at work, while he was, in fact, crafting a long rope for his own neck.

Harold Wilson was right: a week is a long time in politics. Last week, Ramaphosa was feted by King Charles and his royal retinue in lavish London; this week he’s down in the dumps. Ramaphosa has established a record of sorts: the victim who got nailed for the theft of his own goods. But then he cooked his own goose. He was the man elected to clean the Augean stables but tarried and fiddled and instead seems to be drowning in the river. He’s a target who took his time patiently lining up the firing squad for his own execution.

Now, it seems, we’re condemned to listen to moral lectures from the hyenas fighting over the rotting carcass that is the ANC. But his supporters should not rue his fall from grace or the baying and gloating of the hyenas. They should be mad at him. They should be incandescent with rage — for opportunities spurned, crises wasted, daggers that weren’t drawn and lowhanging fruit left unpicked. He was a man blessed with a weak constitution in a job that required absolute resolution.

The Ngcobo report may administer the coup de grace, but the seeds of Ramaphosa’s downfall were planted at the beginning of his presidency when he told us his primary mission was to preserve the unity of the ANC. In other words, not to defend and protect the constitution or the integrity of the country. The interests of his party were paramount. “I’d rather be seen as a weak president than to divide the ANC,” he said. Those words have come back to haunt him. He has now proved to be both weak and divisive.

In a sense his views are no different from those of his predecessor, who argued that the ANC was more important than the country. The upshot of such a credo is most evident in the deployment policy, which in essence is the employment and exploitation of the country’s resources for the sole benefit and gratification of the party and its members.

But this matter should not have arisen in the first place. His business interests should have been placed in a blind trust the moment he got into government. Instead, he seems to have continued his involvement in his private businesses while moonlighting as president. That’s a recipe for disaster. And, on winning the top job, instead of clearing the mess and neutralising his foes, he obsessed over gladdening their hearts, showering them with crucial appointments in the hope they’d return the favour and be nice to him. Now they’re baying for his blood.

Chief among them is Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, his rival for the top post in 2017, now turned tormentor-in-chief who, despite her loss, got a seat at the top table — and proceeded to use her proximity to power to undermine his every step. One would have thought that Dlamini Zuma would be more circumspect, given that she’s been one of the main beneficiaries of his generosity. But no, she’s leading the charge. She wants him to go because she wants his job. If principle came into it, she’d have spoken out when her ex-husband and the Guptas, her benefactors, were plundering the country with impunity.

In his quieter moments, Ramaphosa probably kicks himself for the magnanimity he showed Arthur Fraser, the assassin. Fraser was a prime candidate for the sack after a task team Ramaphosa appointed found huge corruption and mismanagement of millions in taxpayers’ money at the State Security Agency. Instead of showing him the door, Ramaphosa gave him another cushy job as commissioner of correctional services, where he did even more damage by prematurely and illegally releasing Jacob Zuma from jail. The Ngcobo panel says Fraser’s evidence is hearsay but has nevertheless used it to damn Ramaphosa, possibly throwing the country into chaos.

The case of Busisiwe Mkhwebane provides a classic example of Ramaphosa shooting himself in the foot by dragging his feet. He sat on a recommendation for her suspension for some time and was then immediately roused to action when she started sniffing around the Phala Phala scandal. The panel obviously found the motive for her suspension suspicious.

Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula was a hopeless minister who abysmally failed the country during the July unrest. That was good enough for Ramaphosa to promote her to speaker. She’s now reciprocated his good turn by putting together a panel to investigate him. The choice of Sandile Ngcobo to head the panel is interesting. Ngcobo was appointed chief justice by Zuma, overlooking the more experienced Dikgang Moseneke, who was deputy chief justice. One would have thought a judge without a perception of bias would have been preferred.

An unsettling thread running through the report is the sense that the president cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Given a choice between Fraser and Ramaphosa, the panel believed the tall tales told by Fraser. Ramaphosa can probably prevail in parliament, or get a court to pick the report apart. But he’s not known to have the stomach for such a fight. He may be so mortally wounded that he’d have to step down anyway, the consequences of which — to quote a man from a bygone era — are simply too ghastly to contemplate.