We’re on ANC’s road to nowhere
In a poignant scene in the film of the same name, Jack Nicholson proclaims: “What if this is as good as it gets?” Nicholson plays a brilliant author with chronic obsessive-compulsive disorder and a mean streak. He asks this question to a room full of patients like him waiting to see their psychologist.
They could be the citizens of South Africa, in an eternal waiting room anxiously expecting our non-practising president to make a decision. Any decision.
The whole country yearns for President Cyril Ramaphosa to act with any kind of urgency or haste, to be decisive and put our interests before the ruling party’s. We want him to find his backbone and act with exigency.
South Africa was hoping that the Cabinet reshuffle would be the moment he finally found that missing sense of urgency and a (belated) willingness to fire dead wood from his Cabinet. Except he didn’t. Nothing is going to change.
If Ramaphosa is as delusional about ANC internal politics and still believes unity among a bunch of tenderpreneurial hyenas is possible, how can he realistically identify and comprehend the real problems the country faces in the real world?
He turns 71 this year. He is not going to change. This is who he is.
Everybody knows that to fix rolling blackouts Gwede Mantashe cannot continue as energy minister, even if he got Ramaphosa re-elected at Nasrec 2.0. The self-confessed “coal fundamentalist” cannot recall the performance agreement he signed with Ramaphosa to procure 2,000MW of extra energy, nor does he know that the law allows only his department to build new power stations.
But there he is – the most powerful man in the ANC. He’s bulletproof.
Instead of cutting down a bloated Cabinet, Ramaphosa created two more ministries, the role of one of which is to monitor the rest of the government. The new electricity minister has been called a “project manager” by Mantashe – and you know that’s an accurate summary of how Kgosientsho Ramokgopa’s attempts to end blackouts will pan out.
There are many technology solutions to many of South Africa’s problems, but there is hardly any political will to upset the precarious internal factions of the ANC.
More than anything else, Ramaphosa has a credibility problem. Nobody believes him anymore.
Remember the then deputy president proclaiming in September 2015: “In another 18 months to two years, you will forget the challenges that we had with relation to power and energy and Eskom ever happened.”
Consider Eskom’s predicament. Of its R400-billion debt, about R50-billion is owed by ANC-run municipalities that have not paid over the fees collected from residents. An eighth of Eskom’s unsustainable debt exists because of elected officials not fulfilling their constitutional mandate and ethical obligations. Put another way, it’s the effects of cadre deployment.
When the DA took over the councils of Tshwane and Johannesburg, it embarked on a much-publicised disconnection of electricity defaulters, many of whom were government departments. It took a new political party in power for the city management to fulfil its fiduciary duties – not to mention the accounting officers of the various departments – to pay for the electricity used.
It’s a useful way to understand why there have been so few state capture arrests. Until the ruling party is out of government, there is no way one branch of the ANC is going to allow another to be embarrassed about not paying for electricity.
So why would anyone expect anything different with law enforcement agencies?
And we’re now on a financial grey list because of the hollowing out of these dilapidated police and prosecutorial services.
We may have got rid of Jacob Zuma, but the effects of those “nine wasted years”, as Ramaphosa himself called them, continues to linger. Ramaphosa’s time in office will one day also be labelled “wasted years”. As Nicholson pointed out: “This is as good as it gets.”