Light is being shone in dark, festering places all over the country
There hasn’t been a cataclysm by any means, but the overall achievement of Cyril Ramaphosa’s first 100 days as president is greater than the sum of its parts. He has sidelined or fired tainted ministers and replaced them with cleaner pairs of hands; seen the back of the top officials at SARS, Tom Moyane and Jonas Makwakwa; shepherded North West premier Supra Mahumapelo into early retirement and put the province under administration; appointed a commission of inquiry into state capture; redeployed the head of the State Security Agency, Arthur Fraser; and done enough to persuade ratings agencies that economic prospects are brighter under his stewardship.
Crucially, he has unleashed corruption-buster-in-chief Pravin Gordhan, who has been making rapid progress through his own to-do list as minister of public enterprises. Eskom, Denel, Transnet and SA Express have new boards and, in some cases, executives; forensic auditors are investigating state-owned diamond company Alexkor; and there’s much more to come as Sanral, Acsa and others fall under Gordhan’s gimlet-like gaze.
“Virtually every entity that we are supervising, or are responsible for, is going to have changes as far as the board is concerned,” Gordhan said in March, outlining the shape of things to come. “If you take out some of the negativity and some of the negative people, immediately your operations at that entity change. Your revenue changes, therefore your financial situation begins to actually improve. And then your financial credibility changes as well, so your ability to borrow changes.”
There are other signs that the new broom is reaching into long-forgotten corners clogged with mould and filth. The NPA has reinstated charges against Zuma; the Hawks have a new head; SARS is taking steps to undo the damage done by Moyane; and the Reserve Bank has placed VBS Mutual Bank under curatorship and ordered a forensic investigation into whether it aimed to defraud depositors, including municipalities in which managers were allegedly given kickbacks, as we report today.
After 100 days in charge, Ramaphosa is under no illusions about the scale of the task he has taken on. “It will take some time to recalibrate and realign everything so that we can return to building good governance processes,” he told editors in Cape Town on Thursday.
A day earlier, auditor-general Kimi Makwetu revealed findings that must have made for sobering reading in the Presidency. Only 33 out of 257 municipalities received clean audits for 2016-17. Irregular expenditure at local government level, the coalface of service delivery, amounted to R28.37-billion. Put another way — and this calculation could hardly be more apt in light of a 26.7% unemployment rate — 1.3 million people could have had full-time expanded public works programme jobs for the entire year if that money had been used properly. If each of them had supported another three people with their earnings, nearly a 10LLth of the country’s population would be better off today.
Many other comparisons can be drawn, each of which illustrates one of the challenges Ramaphosa faces. Toilets could have been installed to replace the 3 500 pit latrines still in use at schools; homes could have been built for the 14% of people who still live in shacks; VAT could have been reduced in the budget, rather than increased.
The new South Africa, now a month into its 25th year, needs a “new dawn” only because the lights have been off — metaphorically and sometimes literally — for so long. Ramaphosa has always played the long game, so he will not be fazed either by the magnitude of the task or the sniping of critics within the ANC and on opposition benches.
His achievements in 100 days have already begun to overwrite memories of his predecessor’s calamitous 3 145-day administration.
He has done enough to give a beleaguered, cynical and jaded electorate a glimpse of light at the end of a horribly long tunnel.
If you take out some of the negativity . . . operations at that entity change