Ramaphosa, SA is waiting

NOTWITHSTANDING the whiners and doomsayers, we need to congratulate ourselves that the key practice of a functioning democracy, the transfer of power through democratic process, is in place.

This was evidenced by Cyril Ramaphosa’s election as ANC president, the change of government in three key metros – Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay – in 2016, and the transfer of power in the Western Cape over the past general elections from the defunct National Party to the ANC and then to the DA.

A year ago, in political parlance, and taking into account the influence of the Premier League of KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, the Free State and North West, Ramaphosa was a dead man walking, and Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma was a shoo-in for the Presidency. But the democratic process ran its course and Ramaphosa is on his way to the Union Buildings.

The ANC is grasping the nettle of having two centres of power, and lobbying is no doubt intense behind the scenes on the question of the recall of Jacob Zuma as president of the country. The three options to achieve this, two of them parliamentary: impeachment or a vote of no confidence, and the other voluntary resignation or resignation through being recalled by the ANC national executive committee (NEC).

The opposition parties have come to realise that Zuma is a gift that keeps giving them millions of votes. It would be strategically sound for them not to be role players in an impeachment or vote of no confidence, for the longer the man stays, the more he will decimate the ANC brand.

With shocking revelations about Zuma in the books written by Pieter-Louis Myburgh (The Republic of Gupta), Justice Malala (We Have Now Begun Our Descent), Adrian Basson (Enemy of the People) and Jacques Pauw (The President’s Keepers), disillusionment with Zuma’s misrule is reaching fever pitch.

That leaves the voluntary resignation option, and the NEC recalling him. The former will never be consented to by his paymasters, the Guptas.

Ramaphosa needs to act decisively to lance the boil that is Zuma, lead his party in recalling the president and demonstrate that he is determined to restore the the ANC back to its former glory.

President Ramaphosa, the nation awaits.