Leaders and losers
JACOB ZUMA President
F
In 2016 President Jacob Zuma’s performance dropped to a level so low our grading system could no longer deal with it. He did such an astonishingly horrific job of running the country and showed such a total and utter disregard for his duties and obligations that there was no grade low enough to capture it.
At least, we thought, it could not possibly get any worse. In 2017 it got worse. In the previous years of his administration Zuma merely destroyed vital institutions of state in his ever more desperate attempts to avoid facing corruption charges. With the value of hindsight we can now see that his devastation of the likes of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and the Hawks was not all that bad. Because in 2017 Zuma, whose primary job is to unite the country, proved himself willing to go much further than that.
The most obvious example of this was his last stunt of the year: announcing free tertiary education for the poor.
From evidence such as his continued ability to sing Umshini Wam we know that Zuma has not fallen prey to dementia. Thus we know that he knows what he proposed is impossible. This was not the mistake of some doddering fool, it was not an overambitious attempt to secure a legacy, it was a coldly calculated political play, and screw the consequences.
Those consequences include throwing higher education into disarray and destroying the tertiary funding system that, though hardly ideal, was doing a modicum of good. No prizes for guessing whether this will most affect rich or poor students.
In the process Zuma simply threw out the national budget, so deepening the economic and policy uncertainty that continues to hobble growth and job creation while simultaneously undermining Parliament, and his finance minister, and the fees commission he set up only to ignore.
For gut-wrenching cynicism, the fees debacle was topped only by Zuma keeping social development minister Bathabile Dlamini in her position, even after she was found responsible for the social grants crisis that threatened to set the country on fire. And which, by coincidence we think, again affected the most poor and vulnerable in our society.
Much as it looks that way, after all, Zuma surely did not actually target the poor in the games he played. He just did not care what happened to them, or the country as a whole, as long as his fees move influenced the ANC elective conference and as long as Dlamini delivered the ANC Women’s League vote for Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
Relative to that, every other way in which Zuma failed and undermined the country in 2017 pales into insignificance. Yet three of the lowlights are worth recording, if only because any one of these should have seen him frog-marched out of office.
In 2017 Zuma went from playing games with the justice system to, in our opinion, blatantly lying to the courts about a supposed “typing error” in his battle to keep his preferred candidate at the head of the NPA.
In 2017 Zuma had a golden opportunity to tackle the scourge of state capture by setting up a commission of inquiry, as he was legally obliged to do anyway.
He said he would. He insisted that he wanted to. Then he delayed and obfuscated and, as a court has now found, probably continued to break anti-corruption laws with what was at best criminal negligence in his failure to act.
In 2017 Zuma not only giggled in the face of parliamentary oversight, but gifted us with the word “meandos” to explain the fashion in which he was actively avoiding answering questions put to him by the elected representatives of the people.
In short, in 2017 Zuma acted unlawfully, immorally, unethically, and probably illegally. He brought his office into disrepute, he brought his country to the brink, and he didn’t give a damn.
We again decline to rate President Jacob Zuma on the basis that it is impossible to do so. Yet we are compelled to give our nation as a whole an F for allowing him to stay in office for so long. At this point the failure is no longer his, but ours.
CYRIL RAMAPHOSA Deputy President
B
Comrade new president, the cupcake who urges concomitant action, Cyril Ramaphosa.
It’s difficult to determine what exactly Ramaphosa did as deputy president of South Africa this year, when everything he has done has been so coloured by his play for the presidency of the ANC.
To bolster his image as the vanguard of the suppressed morality of the ANC, he has successfully distanced himself from President Jacob Zuma and the litany of disasters that have characterised his presidency. Early in the year, he started off by offering an apology for calling for “concomitant action” to be taken against striking mine workers in Marikana in 2012.
And when the Economic Freedom Fighters’ Floyd Shivambu pushed him in Parliament to clarify what exactly he was apologising for, he did something rarely done in South African politics — he affirmed his responsibilities. “As a leader person, I know I have to be accountable for what I do and what I say,” he said.
Of course, the Marikana apology was carefully calculated as part of his campaign for the ANC presidency but, in the world of political communication, lip service is often all it takes.
Although Zuma is now synonymous with corruption, misgovernance and an ailing economy everywhere from Parys to Paris, Ramaphosa is touted as the great hope for all that is good, sound and wholesome.
But Ramaphosa’s rise and rise away from Zuma is no small feat when you consider he marched back into politics in 2012 with his hand firmly clasped by uBaba kaDuduzane. But five years is a long time in Luthuli House.
And a year is even longer in the Union Buildings when your boss doesn’t speak to you.
At least that’s according to our information early in the year. The working relationship between Zuma and Ramaphosa reportedly deteriorated to such an extent that Ramaphosa wrote to the department of international relations and co-operation to complain about the many issues related to distant lands to which he had been deployed, a ploy, it was alleged, to keep Ramaphosa from running interference on the president.
Then there were the allegations of a rogue state security agency unit that was illegally surveilling and intercepting Ramaphosa’s, and others’, phone calls and emails.
His work as deputy president has obviously been done under intense scrutiny from his political enemies, who purportedly include Zuma.
And some of that work has been extremely important to keeping the peace in Southern Africa. Ramaphosa has been acting as the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC’s) facilitator in Lesotho and has been instrumental in brokering a fragile peace there. Lesotho held its third general election in five years in June.
He was part of a delegation for a post-election dialogue to plot the way forward for the Mountain Kingdom, although one party said he was not an honest broker and SADC should replace him. But SADC is taking no chances and has deployed troops from Zambia to Maseru in case all hell breaks loose again.
But it is not Ramaphosa’s reputation as skilful negotiator in messy neighbourhood conflicts that has so endeared him to the markets. At some time this year, former finance minister Pravin Gordhan told Reuters that, if Ramaphosa was elected ANC leader, “the whole narrative about South Africa’s economy would change for the better within three months”.
It was Ramaphosa’s comments after the axing of Gordhan that ultimately isolated him from Zuma and it was even rumoured that he would be next in the firing line. Although Ramaphosa voiced his opposition to the president’s reshuffle, he refused calls for him to resign in protest.
When it comes to actually doing more than talk, the full endorsement of the minimum wage agreement must count as Ramaphosa’s greatest achievement as deputy president this year. We’re also not so ungracious as to ignore the fact that he headed the delegation that unsuccessfully campaigned for South Africa to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup.
Ramaphosa is rather like a student who is reputed to have great potential but never quite fulfils it. He carefully measures his output to ensure he earns a safe B in any test without exerting himself too much.
It’s never too late to start, though.