While the minnows spat, the big fish wins back the pond

The country’s on tenterhooks. Many are gnashing their teeth. Will the EFF push us over the precipice of revolution? Fear and excitement abound. Fear for those with businesses to lose. An opportunity to loot is always exciting for those without jobs. Whose economy is it anyway, they’d argue.

Will tomorrow be our January 6 moment? Remember the storming of the Capitol in the US, with Donald Trump supporters overpowering security and trashing the seat of power in the biggest economy in the world? Or the storming of the Bastille, as insurgents took control of Paris in 1789? Or will it be July 2021 riots 2.0?

We are not equipped to understand what’s about to happen because ours is a young democracy, the organisers of the shutdown turned 10 only this month and, importantly, they’re keeping security forces and the rest of us guessing what the plan is.

We know the stated outcome (resignation of President Cyril Ramaphosa) and we know they know it will not be achieved. So, what’s the end game? Optics. The EFF wants to be seen as the next biggest thing after the ANC — the alternative to the ANC’s fumbling ways ahead of elections next year. This is why the DA is restless: they know that if the EFF succeeds at this the ANC’s electoral loss could become the EFF’s gain. And the DA wants a weaker ANC, as they do a weaker EFF. This is why the DA’s leaders are frothing at the mouth, effusively fighting the fighters in court. And therein lies the danger.

As the DA and EFF engage in unseemly skirmishes on the sidelines of political power, those behind Ramaphosa are hard at work cleaning up his image after the disaster that was Phala Phala.

As the DA battles its own Fomo, with the EFF hogging headlines this long weekend, Ramaphosa has extricated himself from the snare of the public protector. The preliminary report of the PP, which cleared Ramaphosa, will not change much. It may be a whitewash and a skilful sidestepping of the issues but, politically, it’s a major victory for Ramaphosa.

There’s a slow but important process under way that opposition parties aren’t paying close attention to. You need nous to see the subtleties. The side fissures obscure the view.

Ramaphosa’s public protector victory follows the careful discarding of the expert panel report commissioned by parliament which found he had a case to answer. And please don’t expect Ramaphosa to act after a Constitutional Court decision to not allow him direct access so he could rebut contents of the report. With ANC members voting against it in parliament last year, that matter died its natural death without the court dealing with the contents of the report. Taking it to the

Ramaphosa is masterfully extricating himself from the Phala Phala mess, and the DA and EFF are too busy fighting to notice

high court comes with the risk of courts pronouncing on the content. Those cleaning Ramaphosa’s image will want to avoid that.

Sars has already told us, correctly, that the cash-flush Sudanese businessman Mustafa Mohamed Ibrahim

Hazim didn’t declare his dollars upon entry to our country but, importantly, Ramaphosa had nothing to do with this. The last bit is what matters.

What remains is the criminal investigations by the Hawks — and no-one is expecting them to outperform themselves. It’s not their thing. The last time they tried it, when they were known as the Scorpions, they realised very late that this thing of “investigating without fear or favour” is simply a slogan that, if taken seriously, could lead to their speedy disbandment. The Hawks are not the Scorpions, so expect them to give Ramaphosa a free pass too.

The only real hurdle is the investigation by the Reserve Bank, whose leaders know the removal of Ramaphosa might also lead to the eventual nationalisation of the bank — a point discussed ad nauseam at ANC conferences.

While we know the Bank to be very ethical (Tokyo Sexwale might disagree for known reasons), the question is whether they will have the balls to stand out on their own and cause an internal regime change. I don’t think so.

Great work is being done to sanitise Ramaphosa’s image ahead of next year’s elections. This work also, in a way, puts paid to ambitions of those who thought that with Paul Mashatile coming in as deputy president it would be a matter of weeks, if not days, before Ramaphosa was recalled or made to step aside as the don of the so-called Alex mafia steps up to the main post.

The cleanup means Mashatile is going to have to wait. It’s a good thing he’s getting married, sorting out his private affairs even if it means he must watch Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman to get a sense of what to do next.

While Mashatile manages his ex, the DA is focused on a different version of There’s a Zulu On My Stoep battle with the EFF and the latter is trying to project itself as the real official opposition to the ANC, Ramaphosa’s image is undergoing a thorough cleanup.

He may not even want his image to be cleaned, he may loudly wonder if he wants to be in office, but those who want him to see his two terms out are hard at work peeling the onion one layer at a time.

Soon, Ramaphosa will be facing no investigation at all, smiling from the posters on lampposts, urging us to give him one last chance to prove himself. In speeches he will tell us how committed he is to fighting corruption and state capture. And the majority might just believe him, not because it’s true but because that grade 12 leader of the opposition lacks the nous to read the room. He simply relishes side skirmishes.