President can’t afford to fail SA

NEXT Saturday, Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa will be inaugurated as post-apartheid South Africa’s fifth president for his first full term of office since unseating Jacob Zuma in a bloodless coup last February.

This time, Ramaphosa will be breaking with the tradition of being sworn in on the lawns of the Union Buildings against the iconic Herbert Baker backdrop for Pretoria’s more prosaic Loftus Versfeld Stadium.

It will be cheaper – R100 million less than his predecessor’s – and more accessible for the public. But at R150m, it will still stick in the craw of many South Africans – onethird of whom are dependent on state grants every month – and the rising legions of unemployed and unemployable, many of them youth.

Ramaphosa campaigned on a clean governance ticket, with a pledge to rebuild this country which has been egregiously compromised after a decade of kleptocracy.

His New Dawn, though, appears to be cursed to keep on stumbling. This week, the ANC sent many of the architects and enablers of state capture back to Parliament to be its elected representatives, notwithstanding copious anecdotal evidence of their unfitness for office.

Speculation will reach fever pitch next week on whether the president will make good his pledge to trim the size of his bloated Cabinet and who he will hand-pick to oversee the implementation of this New Dawn after he successfully wrested an unequivocal mandate from this country’s electorate on May 8.

He dare not fail. He dare not disappoint.

We are emerging from a period of reflection into a period of austerity and hard graft, and he simply cannot afford any more faux pas.

At this point, spending R150m on an inauguration does seem to be yet another misstep.

We need to honour the office of the president, and through that respect the scale of what this country has achieved, but at this stage, a party seems very premature.