Covid-19 may be set to claim a political victim

BRAZIL’S President Jair Bolsonaro contracted Covid-19 last week.

He joins a select international club: the prime ministers of Britain, Russia and Guinea-Bissau, the president of Honduras and a sprinkling of cabinet ministers and top politicians in virtually every country in the world.

None has succumbed. The biggest casualty, so far, has been the dented pride of Bolsonaro, who finds himself laid low by a virus he denies exists.

Astonishingly in South Africa, given that the assembled ranks of this ANC administration’s Cabinet looks like a medical poster for dangerous comorbidities like obesity, none aside from Gwede Mantashe has contracted the virus. The explanation must lie in their abstemious habits as regards alcohol and tobacco.

There is, however, one top South African fatality potentially lined up. It’s President Cyril Ramaphosa himself.

Not a medical casualty, but a political one. After a promising start by the president when the pandemic first surfaced, Ramaphosa’s subsequently poor performance is at long last coming under some critical examination.

Admittedly, the crowds still love him. But internally, within the ANC and its partners, it’s not so rosy. It’s obvious that despite two-and-a-half years in power, he has still not managed to stamp his authority over the Zuma-remnants.

During the past four months of the pandemic, some of his Cabinet ministers have been overt in their disdain towards Ramaphosa, especially Police Minister Bheki Cele and the president’s arch-rival, Cooperative Affairs and Governance Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma.

It’s forced the president into humiliating flip-flops on cigarette bans and alcohol sales, wilting like an errant schoolboy before the imperious school ma’am, Dlamini Zuma. At least, on health issues such as these, he can portray his weakness as evidence of an admirable openness to persuasion by expert opinion.

There is no place to hide, however, when it comes to his reflexive bending of the knee to Cele, the Cat in the Hat, and other securocrats. Here he has faced serial challenges and each time he has backed down.

Cele, who also overruled Ramaphosa ally Health Minister Zweli Mkhize on whether outside exercise would be allowed and later bizarrely decreed that motorists without till slips for their cigarettes would be arrested, speaks in belligerent tones. And with this tacit support from the defence and police ministers, the security forces have been predictably heavy-handed in their enforcement of lockdown.

Yet despite the subsequent more than a dozen alleged deaths and close on 500 complaints of security force violence, Ramaphosa has never unambiguously denounced their behaviour.

One can find examples of Ramaphosa’s timidity in virtually every area of his presidency. He has no appetite for the kind of confrontation with the unions and the SACP that is necessary to close the national airline, secure alternative power generation, fire the crooks and fools that run most of the state-owned entities, and slash the public service wage bill.

It is remarkable, then, how resilient media regard has been for Ramaphosa. With Covid-19 mercilessly highlighting the ANC’s quarter of a century of failure, this may, at last, be changing.

For Daily Maverick’s veteran commentator Ferial Haffajee, the final straw appears to have been the resumption of load shedding. She writes this week: “(It) is like an X-ray revealing the weaknesses of Ramaphosa’s presidency and his inability to deliver on his promises, no matter how wellmeaning his intentions… Ramaphosa presides over a broken state and patronage circles continue to expand.”

BusinessLive’s Peter Bruce, who endured vitriolic abuse for his support of a tactical vote by opposition voters for Ramaphosa, is similarly disenchanted. He writes this week: “Ramaphosa’s ability to deftly finesse even the difficult trade-offs seems to have deserted him. His government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a lurch from one bumble to the next… For the first time I have begun to wonder whether, in fact, he will, in the aftermath of this crisis, be able to hold on to leadership of the party.”

I think Bruce is right. As I’ve written previously, while it may be true Ramaphosa is the only person in the ANC who could save South Africa, his fear of the almighty internecine battle that such a rescue would demand, means that he won’t. He doesn’t have the courage.

Ramaphosa’s one consistency, again shown during the pandemic, has been his willingness to put party before country, appeasement before principle. That’s unlikely to change now. He will either go meekly – another early recall – or continue to lead timidly.