Why the party’s over for ANC
The Phala Phala furore surrounding Cyril Ramaphosa speaks to little more than the ANC’s internal factionalism. It’s indicative of the general malaise in the ruling party
Why are we discussing animal farms, private animal farms at that, when there are such major, major problems facing our people?
Last weekend, the ruling party fixated on the $580,000 (R10m) private sale of a rare breed of buffalo rather than the billions in taxpayer money it has lost to corruption and state capture each year.
Far from solutions to the country’s very deep challenges — including energy, a looming water crisis, rampant crime, biting unemployment and poverty — the party’s national executive committee (NEC) chose to satisfy factional impulses at its first in-person meeting after a two-year, Covid-induced hiatus.
It is this kind of shameless and unrestrained egoism, over and above the ANC’s myriad other weaknesses, that is driving the party’s dramatic fall from grace.
That’s largely the result of the divided NEC elected alongside President Cyril Ramaphosa at the ANC’s Nasrec elective conference five years ago. At the time, Ramaphosa was elected to save the ANC from the electoral firing squad in the 2019 election. But the broader NEC — and the top six — were deeply factionalised.
Now, ahead of Ramaphosa’s December bid for re-election as ANC head, the group with which he has shared power for the past five years — those, at least, who attempted to hobble any real reform and were opposed to any attempt to end the looting — are making their last stand.
The fight began five months ago, after the release of an affidavit by Arthur Fraser, the compromised former director-general of the State Security Agency (SSA) and ally to former president Jacob Zuma.
Melding fact with fiction, Fraser accused Ramaphosa of money-laundering, corruption, kidnapping and concealing a crime after the alleged theft of foreign currency from his Limpopo game farm.
Fraser is a man with a lot to lose. Chief justice Raymond Zondo’s commission of inquiry into state capture found him to be among those at the heart of SSA machinations to further Zuma’s agenda. The inquiry recommended that he be investigated for corruption.
His story, however has been milked and bolstered by Ramaphosa’s opponents inside and outside the ANC, culminating in a parliamentary process to decide if he should face an impeachment inquiry.
Only in SA would such flimsy, compromised information be allowed to influence such a potentially severe sanction.
Ironically, Ramaphosa’s predecessor spent R250m in taxpayer money on upgrades to his private residence at Nkandla and was reelected by the ANC afterwards. Zuma never faced an impeachment inquiry, and the ANC NEC barely batted an eyelid.
He went on to be implicated in democratic South Africa’s largest corruption scandal, with state power essentially handed to the Gupta family.
After the Zuma experience, the ANC could arguably be playing things more carefully now —“once bitten, twice shy”. But that’s an intellectually weak and fickle argument.
Still, the president’s response to the Phala Phala saga has been deeply flawed. By dealing with a decidedly political matter in a legal way, he lent credibility to the narrative provided by a spook gone rogue. He refused to take the nation into his confidence on the matter — and that should have been his primary responsibility as state president.
It was only at the weekend’s NEC meeting that he finally broke his silence.
The FM understands that Ramaphosa’s submission to the NEC mirrors his response to the public protector, as well as to the parliamentary panel — led by former Constitutional Court justice Sandile Ngcobo — charged with deciding if impeachment would be a legitimate course of action.
The party that initiated the parliamentary inquiry is the African Transformation Movement (ATM) — something of a factional ANC plant in parliament. After Zuma’s anointed presidential candidate, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, lost the ANC presidency to Ramaphosa in 2017, his loyalists mobilised support for an alternative party to contest elections: the newly minted ATM.
One of the ATM’s two MPs is Mzwanele Manyi — the spokesperson for the Jacob Zuma Foundation.
In the ultimate irony, Zuma — a man who allowed his finance minister to be selected by a trio of businessman brothers from Uttar Pradesh — accused Ramaphosa of committing treason.
Ramaphosa has submitted that there is nothing untoward about his farming operations: his father was a farmer, he is said to have told the NEC, and he always had had a desire to farm. And, he added, he had made no extra money off Phala Phala, with the business simply sustaining itself.
In Ramaphosa’s version, he has broken no laws: the foreign currency stolen from his property was the proceeds of a legitimate sale, and the money was collected by a farm manager. The FM understands that Ramaphosa said it wasn’t his usual farm manager who took delivery of the cash, but a stand-in who opted not to place the money in the safe because too many people had access to the safe. Instead, he put it in the president’s private quarters, from where it was stolen.
He said he then reported the matter to his head of security Wally Rhoode, and left it at that.
But with two contrasting narratives at play — Fraser’s and that of Ramaphosa — the president was not let off the hook by the remnants of the so-called radical economic transformation (RET) faction in the NEC. Aligned to Zuma, it includes co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister and presidential hopeful Dlamini Zuma.
Any hopes the RET brigade may have had to unseat Ramaphosa, however, ended in a whimper, with the president surviving their calls for him to step aside.
In part, this is because not even the ANC’s integrity committee has been able to make any sense of the Phala Phala saga.
A leaked copy of the committee’s interim report has apparently found that while the matter has brought the ANC into disrepute, it remains unclear who is responsible. Ramaphosa? Fraser? A faction in the ANC?
The matter is so deeply factionalised and its proponents so heavily compromised that it’s difficult to separate the truth from the lies.
So, while the committee has distanced itself from the leaked report, this is probably the closest one can come to untangling the Phala Phala knot.
Ngcobo’s panel has been given until November 30 to complete its work. At this stage, it is still unclear if it will have any more success than the ANC’s intrepid integrity committee in making sense of it all.
In the end, it’s likely to come down to the word of Ramaphosa against that of Fraser.
If the panel finds that Ramaphosa should face an impeachment inquiry, he will need the NEC’s support: the party’s top leadership will either force him to step aside, or it will rally MPs to his cause.
If it comes down to a vote, the ANC could use its majority in parliament to vote to retain him. Or — less likely — to force him out of office if he’s lost the confidence of the NEC.
The options really depend on the balance of power between the different factions.
Should Ramaphosa be forced to step aside, Paul Mashatile — ANC treasurer-general and contender for the deputy president post in December — could stand for the party presidency at the elective conference. He’d have a strong shot at clinching it, and could go on to take up the country’s presidency, as Ramaphosa did when Zuma resigned.
The ANC could also opt for a caretaker arrangement, with a former leader such as Kgalema Motlanthe stepping in until the 2024 election — a mirror of the arrangement when Thabo Mbeki was forced to relinquish the presidency in 2008.
But all of this rests on whether Fraser’s allegations hold up to scrutiny. And that’s very unlikely.
In a casual chat with the FM following the NEC meeting, former finance minister Tito Mboweni — who, it must be said, was not present at the meeting — laughed off the matter. “Why are we discussing animal farms, private animal farms at that, when there are such major, major problems facing our people?” he asked.
“Why are we talking about animal farms when we are heading for a bulk water crisis, when our youth can’t find work, when we don’t have energy? Where is our imagination? This is a waste of our time. Forget about these damned things.”
But there is another, admittedly left-field possibility. Could the ANC be using its internal battles — Phala Phala being just the latest iteration — to distract from its monumental governance failures, and lack of solutions for the real and pressing problems facing the country? Has the party descended to such unconscionable depths?
The electorate is sure to provide that answer when it votes in 2024.