Failing to come clean diminishes credibility of Cyril Ramaphosa
President Cyril Ramaphosa missed a golden opportunity in his weekend article on the Zondo state-capture inquiry and its findings.
He could” have included a few sentences apologising to South Africans for his complicity as a member of the ANC and cabinet collective in what he now calls a “betrayal of the trust of our people and contempt for the values of our constitution .
Ramaphosa’s failure to do so — opting instead to beat his chest about what he has done since becoming president — may widen the trust gap between him and South Africans. British social psychologist Dominic Abrams defines trust “as the confidence that things that other people do and say reflect their genuine beliefs and intentions”.
As chief justice Raymond Zondo has found, in one particular case relating to commuter rail agency Prasa, Ramaphosa “fell short of the standard that would have been expected from him in a matter involving fighting corruption”.
Zondo was referring to Ramaphosa’s failure to lift a finger in support of Popo Molefe who, as Prasa chair, approached the top six officials of the ANC with a list of corrupt dealings at the agency. Ramaphosa was deputy president of both the republic and the ANC at the time.
No matter how one looks at Popo Molefe’s meeting with five of the ANC’s top six officials, including then president Jacob Zuma and then deputy president Ramaphosa, what is clear is that Mr Popo Molefe approached the ANC officials to inform them of corruption problems at Prasa and seek support from them. “What is equally clear is that the ANC officials did not quite give him any support.”
Zondo says that South Africans would not have been surprised if Zuma did not give Molefe support for his fight against corruption, “but I believe they would have expected deputy president Ramaphosa’s reaction and attitude to be different from that of president Zuma.”
Ramaphosa did nothing to support a man he would later describe to the Zondo commission as “a dear friend and comrade”. He didn’t even call Molefe afterwards to check on how he was doing.
What’s worse is that when quizzed by the Zondo commission about the meeting with Molefe, Ramaphosa sought to hang Molefe, on the basis that he had the Public Finance Management Act in his armoury and should have used it to fight corruption instead of approaching the top leaders of the ANC.
The same Ramaphosa told parliament on November 12 2015 that cabinet members were bound by the provisions of the Prevention & Combating of Corrupt Activities Act of 2004. “This act requires that any person who holds a position of authority and who knows or ought reasonably to have known of corrupt activities must report such to the police. Anyone who fails to do so is guilty of an offence,” he said.
Yet, after Molefe briefed him and his ANC colleagues, Ramaphosa failed to support Molefe and did not take the steps the Prevention & Combating of Corrupt Activities Act enjoined him to take as a cabinet member. This, based on his own words, makes him guilty of an offence.
Even without the information Molefe presented to the ANC leaders, Ramaphosa, in both his roles as deputy president of the country and of the ANC, ought reasonably to have known of the corrupt activities taking place in state-owned entities, including Prasa.
I base this on the affidavit of Cassius Lubisi (the former director-general in the presidency) that formed part of Ramaphosa’s submission to the Zondo commission. Lubisi says it became clear in 2010 that state-owned entities “faced numerous challenges”. This included “significant governance and leadership challenges”, which meant entities such as SAA, Eskom and the SA Post Office were unable to retain their executives “because of tensions between the boards and executive management”.
Surely, both as a member of the ANC’s national executive committee and as its deputy president, Ramaphosa should have asked himself, if not his comrades, why there was this tension between boards and executive management.
In his article in the Sunday Times, Ramaphosa sought to distance himself from those who abused their “positions of responsibility” to commit “a great wrong against the people of SA”. But he said nothing of his sin of omission in the Prasa case. Rather, he painted himself as a friend of the common man, as distinct from a friend of the old, discredited, corrupt order.
Ramaphosa’s sin may have been one of omission rather than commission, but it’s still a sin, for which he owes the people of SA an apology.