ANC has to confront Zuma’s true colours

PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma has once again shown that he is unfit to hold office. This hardly comes as a surprise, given that his tenure as head of state for the past eight years has been dogged by one scandal after another.

His reckless actions over the past week — approving an overseas investment trip by the then finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, then rescinding his approval and calling the minister back to South Africa on spurious grounds and firing him a few days later on the strength of a dubious intelligence report — just drove home the urgent need for South Africa to extricate itself from a destructive head of state.

Of course it is Zuma’s constitutional prerogative, as head of state, to hire and fire ministers and their deputies. But in doing so he must be rational and must take into account, above all else, the interests of the country.

He failed to do so this week, not for the first time.

In Malusi Gigaba, Zuma might have appointed a much better finance minister than Des van Rooyen — the man he replaced Nhlanhla Nene with in December 2015, with disastrous consequences — even though it was only because of pressure from within the ANC, as well as from its alliance partner the SACP, that Zuma abandoned plans to make ANC MP and former Eskom boss Brian Molefe the new political head of the National Treasury.

But the fact remains that Gigaba — just like Molefe and Van Rooyen — has strong ties to the Gupta family, leading to strong suspicions that the changes at the Treasury have more to do with serving that family’s interests than with strengthening the government’s capacity to deliver services to the population.

This suspicion is further fuelled by the fact that senior leaders of the president’s own party, the ANC — Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, secretary-general Gwede Mantashe and treasurergeneral Zweli Mkhize — are publicly distancing themselves from the changes. If the president did not discuss the reshuffle with his own party, who did he discuss it with? It is hard not to think that the answer lies in Saxonwold.

Party loyalty, more than anything, is what has kept Zuma in power despite his obvious unpopularity with most citizens.

ANC leaders in parliament and elsewhere have always shielded him from attempts to remove him — believing that his ousting may lead to a debilitating split in the party.

Now that it is clear to them that the president’s loyalty is not with the country, the constitution, or even the party, but with his friends — who even have a say in who gets a cabinet post — the question is what the likes of Ramaphosa are going to do about it.