A promise of a cleaner South Africa

With the departure of a compromised top prosecutor, the country’s new president can now take on endemic corruption in government and the ruling African National Congress.

The ouster of South Africa’s chief prosecutor by the country’s highest court on Monday demonstrates both the hurdles and the promise of the battle against deeply ingrained corruption, which he pledged after the resignation under duress of the perfidious Jacob Zuma as president six months ago.

The prosecutor, Shaun Abrahams, had been installed as director of public prosecutions by Mr. Zuma in 2015 to ensure impunity for his intimate and lucrative dealings with a powerful family, the Guptas, in what is known as “state capture” — a form of corruption in which private businesses manipulate official policy to their advantage. Mr. Abrahams was forced out after the Constitutional Court concluded that his appointment resulted from an abuse of power by Mr. Zuma, namely a payout of more than $1 million to Mr. Abrahams’s predecessor, Mxolisi Nxasana.

That clears the way for Mr. Zuma’s successor, Cyril Ramaphosa, to appoint someone capable of waging a tough, independent and credible cleansing of South Africa’s officialdom, which the president promised on taking over from Mr. Zuma. The problem is that Mr. Abrahams was only one shoot in the systemic corruption that has spread through his party, the African National Congress, in the 24 years it has ruled largely unchallenged since the triumph over apartheid. As Norimitsu Onishi and Selam Gebrekidan reported recently in

The Times, some of the top leaders of the party and the government are there not by merit or achievement, but through graft and patronage.

So the question is whether Mr. Ramaphosa can really cleanse the ANC, in which he depends for his power on the support of many powerful politicians. The political challenge was graphically illustrated by the recent deaths of two children in pit toilets, which remain in widespread use in a school infrastructure ravaged by pervasive graft in provincial education departments. One former provincial education minister, David Mabuza, has been accused of enriching himself and funding elaborate patronage by taking money from the education budget in his home province, yet today he is Mr. Ramaphosa’s first deputy.

What is promising in Mr. Abrahams’s ouster is the evidence that South African institutions remain capable of taking action against corruption. The police and their main corruption-fighting unit have new chiefs, as do several state-owned companies, and a high-level commission is investigating state capture. Mr. Zuma is on trial and the Guptas have fled the country.

Whether Mr. Ramaphosa and the ANC have the political will to clean up their ranks will become evident as the guilty start heading for prison and the state starts to recoup the pilfered billions. That may take time, but the tools are there.