RESHUFFLE OF NEVERLAND OPTIMISM
Say what you like about Jacob Zuma, there was a certain pizazz an almost admirable self-absorption in the midnight cabinet reshuffles, in keeping the nation up until the witching hour before unleashing a horror show of the corrupt, incapable and compromised.
Sadly, the best that can be said of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Monday mash-up was that it was over and done by 9pm even if it was twice postponed (three times if you count The Great Cold of 2023). And that Fikile Mbalula, after a protracted game of “minister-minister”, has now taken his performative ineptitude to Luthuli House, while Lindiwe Sisulu will surely find a welcoming home in Tottenham. Nathi Mthethwa, meanwhile, was clearly hoist with his own flagpole.
For the rest, Ramaphosa’s reshuffle is something of an insult. His address, as always, was padded with platitudes and awash with the usual ANC shortcomings: a lack of historicism, a rewarding of loyalty over capability, and a blind clinging to the fiction that a broken organisation can fix a broken country.
Leave aside, for the moment, the coterie of incompetents who have retained their cushy cabinet seats.
For a start, Ramaphosa saw no contradiction in asking the National Treasury and the presidency to “develop a proposal to rationalise government departments, entities and programmes which will result in the reduction of ministries”, and then promptly appointing two additional cabinet ministers both in the presidency. This from a man who, on taking office, promised a slimmed-down cabinet.
It’s particularly galling coming on top of an announcement by the DA that the taxpayer has coughed up about R2bn over the past five years for just the support staff of ministers and deputy ministers.
One of the new ministers is Ramaphosa ’ s infrastructure and investment tsar Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, who’s been handed the hospital pass of the electricity portfolio. How he will navigate the hard place between a Gwede and a Gordhan will have to be seen.
Still, Ramaphosa assured us that the position is temporary — just until the energy crisis is resolved. Presumably Ramokgopa will be expected to fill the hole the ANC has been digging for more than a decade in just a few short years. It’s the kind of Neverland optimism that led to Ramaphosa promising an end to load-shedding by 2018.
The centralisation of power in the presidency continues apace, with not just the appointment of the electricity minister but the reinstatement of a minister of planning, monitoring & evaluation. Pity Maropene Ramokgopa, who now has the thankless task of overseeing the dearth of implementation of government programmes. With four ministers and eight deputies, the presidency is starting to resemble a cabinet within a cabinet — one of the talk shops so favoured by Ramaphosa.
Finally, that Ramaphosa is treating the new cabinet like a caretaker administration ahead of elections next year is the ultimate insult. He’s retained so much of the deadwood — think Bheki Cele, Gwede Mantashe and Pravin Gordhan alone — on the pretext of continuity (read: loyalty). So expect a continuity of inaction.
That whooshing sound was Ramaphosa’s credibility passing by.
Ramaphosa is that kid on the playground handing out suckers in an effort to make everyone like him. Only, we South Africans are the real suckers here. And we’re not just paying financially; the ANC — Ramaphosa — is trading in the future of the nation to paper over its own fractiousness and indecision.