BUT CYRIL?

What I want is for Ramaphosa to buy himself enough time to get our institutions right. He has made a good start and I’d rather have him at the helm than almost anyone else in our politics

Ican almost hear the conversation. “Ask Peter Bruce,” says the editor of the FM. He’s talking to his colleagues about a feature on whether people should vote for Cyril Ramaphosa on May 8. Someone’s writing about why we should avoid Ramaphosa. I’m the patsy to support him.

It’s my own fault. Last October I was in a bar near Cape Town and the barman, an Afrikaans guy who recognised me, started talking politics. “I’m voting for Cyril,” he said, “despite the expletive expletive ANC.” At least he is there and can do some good, he said. I’d been thinking the same and wrote a column about the prospect of older white men like me (I’m 66) voting ANC on May 8, despite its atrocious record in office. The response was wild. Letters poured in denouncing me. The worse it got, the more determined I became to follow my heart.

Why Ramaphosa? Because he is a fundamentally decent man trying his best to right the SA ship from an extremely difficult angle. His party is deeply corrupt, he himself is compromised by everything from using the word “concomitant” just before Marikana to the fact that he was Jacob Zuma’s deputy for nearly five years. How could he not have known that thievery was going on?

Quite easily, I reckon. When people around you conspire to hide things, they can. And, excuse me, “concomitant”, which he used when asking police to intervene in the murderous violence ahead of the Marikana massacre, simply means “appropriate”. You’re allowed to assume a police general knows that.

I’m not put off by the stories that he will be “removed” by the Zumarites in the party after he wins them the election; that, somehow, Ace Magashule “runs” the ANC. None of the warnings about this tells us how the coup will be performed and by whom, and who the replacement candidate might be.

For now Ramaphosa has a working majority in the party’s National Executive Committee

(which could as easily remove Magashule as it could Ramaphosa) and the national general council next year cannot change elective conference decisions. The ANC may be corrupt, but it is fiendishly protective of its rules.

What I want is for Ramaphosa to buy himself enough time to get our institutions right. He has made a good start but there’s a long way to go, and I’d rather have him appointing judges to the Constitutional Court than almost anyone else in our politics. The fact is he has to step carefully in the party to fix the country.

I always use this wonderful part of a speech by former deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke to describe the powers Ramaphosa has to do good while he can, obviously while making some uncomfortable political compromises. But forget the party. Focus on the country and fix what is possible while he has power. Here’s Moseneke’s shortened list of presidential powers:

“Unlike other countries where the deputy president is a running mate, here he [she] is appointed by the president. The president appoints the ministers of the cabinet, leaders of government business to the National Assembly ... all ambassadors ... the chief justice ... the president of the Supreme Court of Appeal ... the judge president of the land claims court and chair of the competition tribunal, and the judge president of the competition appeal court.

“He [she] appoints all judges on advice from the [Judicial Service Commission] and acting judges in consultation with the chief justice ... heads of many vital public institutions [such as] the national director of public prosecutions, the public protector, the auditor-general ... commissioners of the public service commission, the head of the defence force and the military command of the defence force, the head of the police, the head of the intelligence service and members of the financial & fiscal commission ... the statistician-general, the governor ... of the SA Reserve Bank and the commissioner of [the] SA Revenue Service.

“The constitution empowers the president to appoint commissions of inquiry... any number of deputy ministers [from the National Assembly] and ... two deputy ministers from outside the Assembly ... to designate four persons to the judicial service commission in consultation with the leaders of parties in the National Assembly, and alone to establish an intelligence service other than the defence and police force.”

Had enough? Got someone else in mind who might actually be in a position to use these powers? Give me a name, I beg you.