Cyril has his back to the wall

People like me who cheered when President Cyril Ramaphosa won the ANC leadership race and then eased Jacob Zuma out of the government get a bit of stick from the sceptics in our body politic. We’re at best naive, starry-eyed. So it was a pleasant surprise to read the liberal historian and Oxford don, RW Johnson, write recently that “whether we like it or not, Cyril Ramaphosa and his old United Democratic Front comrades are our thin red line, our last line of defence against a national collapse”.

Johnson believes South Africa, post the Zuma years, is perilously close to failure. “Let us be frank,” he writes, “we face a situation of the utmost gravity. Twenty-four years of majority rule have all but ruined the country, Ramaphosa and those who support him have their backs to the wall as the corrupt and criminal elements of the Zuma regime try to resist at every point.

“We are now so close to a debt trap that the best argument for not closing down SAA completely is that it might start a run on Eskom and all the other SOEs.”

He has famously predicted South Africa will have to turn to the IMF or the World Bank for rescue, such is the state of our finances. He criticises Ramaphosa for continuing to talk about creating a new state bank out of nothing, but his natural ideological home, the DA, comes in for particularly scorching criticism.

He calls the chirping of the DA chief whip, John Steenhuisen, which prompted Ramaphosa to tell him to “shut up” in parliament a few weeks ago “juvenile”.

“DA strategy,” he writes, “has to recognise that the present government is the best available . . . and it [the DA] has to prepare itself for the possibility of a coalition with the Ramaphosa section of the ANC when the iceberg hits the ship. What it cannot afford to do is to keep pretending that Ramaphosa is Zuma and indulging in the usual low-level partisan games with its eyes set only on the 2019 election.”

Wise words. The DA’s inclination to conduct its politics on little more than sniping at the ANC robs the country of authentic policy choices. It simply has to begin talking its own position rather than merely criticising the ideas of others.

There’s a scenario — a bit of a stretch, I know —that the ANC splits before the 2019 election.

Already some Zuma supporters in KwaZulu-Natal are planning a breakaway, but their policy position is so feeble — radical economic transformation with all land falling under the control of traditional leaders — I doubt even Zuma would seriously entertain it.

But if somehow Ramaphosa were unable to secure a parliamentary majority next year he would be forced to form a coalition. Informal or formal, first in line would be the EFF, which would demand a high price for its support.

Ominously, recent by-election results in the rural Western Cape seem to indicate the DA support may be slipping in its own backyard. If the sense gathers pace that the DA may not be able to increase on the 23% it won in 2014 then it faces a once-unimaginable prospect — that its former supporters could vote tactically for Ramaphosa’s ANC next year to prevent Julius Malema and the EFF gaining a toe-hold in the government.

That’s also a stretch. But, as Johnson suggests, Ramaphosa and former United Democratic Front colleagues like Pravin Gordhan, Trevor Manuel, Popo Molefe and possibly some day Mosiuoa Lekota, may be the best government available right now for the country, and the DA has to deal with that.

“I write this in no partisan sense,” says Johnson. “It is decades since I supported the ANC — but this is a time to put partisanship aside. This poses the question of what the opposition should be doing. The answer is, exactly the opposite to what it is doing now.”

What he wants from the DA, what a lot of people I know who support the DA want, is that it finds an authoritative voice on where the ANC is weak.

Already Ramaphosa is threatening to slip away from it on the land issue, by not changing the constitution in pursuit of expropriation without compensation.

But an unaffordable public sector wage deal, an unworkable national health insurance scheme, a state bank, are real, solid targets for a centrist opposition. Pursuing Ramaphosa on these issues promises a lot more than the absurd pretence that he is just another

Zuma.