MAKING A CABINET OUT OF DEADWOOD
Ramaphosa has little to work with as he agonises over the eagerly awaited restructuring
It has been more than two weeks since President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the coming of a power messiah, in the form of a minister of electricity in the presidency. This week Eskom teetered on the brink of stage 8 loadshedding after breakdowns and shutdowns took 21,243MW off the grid, with planned maintenance further knocking down capacity.
South Africa is still waiting for Ramaphosa to identify the minister set to deliver us from darkness — and also for the team he will select to drive his administration’s programme, a year before the toughest election the ANC has faced since it ascended to power in 1994. The current bunch are beyond useless. This is the biting reality every South African faces almost every time they visit a police station or a state hospital, send their children to state schools, visit a home affairs office or expect an uninterrupted water or electricity supply. The likes of Bheki Cele, Angie Motshekga, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, Thulas Nxesi, Senzo Mchunu and Ebrahim Patel are hardly the crack team you would want to take into a legacy-shaping year of your presidency, or on which the fate of your party rests.
Take Cele, who last week blithely announced a staggering increase in murders across the country — and his only solution was more boots on the ground amid an already bloated, unprofessional and corrupt police force, while making a plea for citizens to join the fight against crime. Or Nxesi, who heads the labour ministry and is also the acting public service & administration minister but has not moved an inch on professionalising the public service. Or Motshekga, who throws around lofty pass rates but on whose watch millions of children have been doomed to illiteracy, ignorance and failure. Or Dlamini Zuma, who has presided over severe municipal decay. Ramaphosa himself conceded in his state of the nation address that 163 of the country’s 257 municipalities are dysfunctional, in distress, ineffective and corrupt.
The promise of a new team surrounding Ramaphosa is indeed welcome, but objectively there is little hope that the reshuffle will deliver what business and society have been hoping for. Business Unity South Africa and Business Leadership South Africa, in a letter to Ramaphosa, called for “forward looking”, “effective” and “intellectually inquisitive” ministers.
It is an ideal with which no South African would disagree, but unfortunately it is politically naive.
Ramaphosa’s cabinet selection is limited by one crucial factor it has to be almost entirely chosen from the MPs who were sworn in to represent the ANC in parliament after the 2019 election. Legally, he may appoint only two ministers and two deputy ministers who are not MPs. The two current ministers who are not MPs are finance minister Enoch Godongwana, and Patel, minister of trade & industry. The two deputy ministers are local government deputy minister Thembi Nkadimeng and social development’s Hendrietta BogopaneZulu.
The rest must be drawn from the ANC benches in parliament.
There is also a limit to how many MPs can be switched out — for instance, for every outsider he wishes to bring in, one ANC member would have to effectively resign. For most, politics is a career, making them unlikely to want to do so. He is also bound by the list submitted by the ANC in 2019 to the Electoral Commission of South Africa. According to parliamentary rules, political parties may make changes to their lists in terms of reordering them, but there is a “window period” in which they can do so, once a year, usually around the anniversary of the election. And no more than 25% of candidates may be replaced.
Back in 2019, when the current MPs were selected, corruption-accused Ace Magashule ran the ANC’s parliamentary list process. Magashule, then ANC secretary-general, was accused of meddling with the party list to ensure that his favoured people — and those close to former president Jacob Zuma — made it back into parliament.
Ramaphosa’s December re-election as ANC president was accompanied by an incoming ANC national executive committee and national working committee more sympathetic and loyal to him.
But on the MP front, he is stuck with the awful bunch whose selection was strongly influenced by Magashule. It is a mish-mash of the RET faction and Zuma loyalists, most of them talentless, many the kind of numbskull bottom-feeders who characterised the era of the man from Nkandla. You could hardly say they had been chosen for being “forward looking”, “effective” or “intellectually inquisitive”. Many of those sympathetic to Ramaphosa say this is a huge headache for him as he endlessly contemplates reshuffling his cabinet. The FM understands work is already being done to identify a stronger crop of leaders to enter parliament and provincial legislative structures after the 2024 election (and in the run-up to the party’s list process, which will take place ahead of the polls next year). There will be a keen focus on ensuring that ANC members who are professionals, from across various sectors of society, are included on those lists. For now, Ramaphosa must work with what he’s got.
A really bold move would be to totally overhaul his cabinet, brutally slash the number of ministers and deputy ministers and assign many of them to join the best of the bad bunch occupying ANC benches. But the president is hardly known for his courage in the face of a crisis.
There is frustration inside the ANC and society around the delays in announcing the reshuffle. Given what he has to work with, it may end up being simply not worth the wait.