Which is the more scary — the ANC united or divided?

I’ve had a short break and it’s been entertaining watching my colleagues try to deal with the evident changes in narrative required by the fact that

President Cyril Ramaphosa came out of the ANC’s national executive council meeting last weekend somewhat strengthened.

There have been three broad responses. The first were cheerful newspaper headlines declaring

Ramaphosa the “winner” in what commentators had set up as a political showdown between him and ANC secretarygeneral and Jacob Zuma surrogate in the party’s “top six”, Ace Magashule, over Covid corruption and corruption in general in the ANC.

The second acknowledged that Ramaphosa had indeed “won” the political argument against Magashule, but insisted that only action mattered. Ramaphosa or the institutions he has dominion over needed now to get the guilty arrested, into court and into jail.

The third tried to ignore the outcome of the meeting altogether, a not unreasonable position to adopt if you’d been insisting through the lockdowns and party infighting that Ramaphosa is a mere puppet and the government is run by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and the party by Magashule.

As usual, the ideal position would be a mixture of all three. People are right to be sceptical about Ramaphosa and action, but it would also be useful to drop the scaremongering about

Magashule and Zuma. Their

“faction” is a shadow of its former self.

Magashule was obliged, basically, to side with

Ramaphosa directly against

Zuma over the issue of whether, on corruption, the

ANC is perceived as

“accused No 1” — a notion

Zuma railed against in an open letter just before the weekend meeting began. There will be other factions and faction fragments constantly at Ramaphosa, but watching Zuma, who always fights from the shadows, being flushed out of his cover was lovely.

Now we wait for arrests. How hard is it going to be for the beleaguered National Prosecuting Authority to frame charges around fraud on protective medical equipment? Arresting people is not Ramaphosa’s job, but he has political space now to do two vital things. He needs to find a way of creating special courts to hear Covid-related corruption cases — which have now also spread to grant payments — quickly and to dispense justice in the roughest way possible.

Second, he needs to reshuffle his cabinet and, if possible, cut it more. His empty-headed communications minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams has driven the Post Office to its knees since forcing Mark Barnes out last year, firing his deputy and appointing a wildly inappropriate chair to the board. The Post Office is now asking for R5bn and the minister is directly to blame. And I doubt Ramaphosa still needs Aaron Motsoaledi at home affairs, even if he is a political ally. The acquisition of thousands of skilled immigrants by this country is of vital economic importance to SA, and Motsoaledi has done nothing about it.

Still, you have to ask, after last weekend, what is the more scary prospect for the country — a divided ANC or a united one? The divided one brings the economic genius of the EFF into future equations. For the moment, though, the united front Ramaphosa has (however briefly) created will, or should, worry the opposition, especially the DA, which is in a special policy conference this weekend and meets again next month to elect Helen Zille and John Steenhuisen to the positions of federal executive leader and party leader respectively.

The election has been a painful affair, with resignations and investigations of a range of senior members accompanying the balloting. I sympathise with Zille. Administratively, the party was a mess after Mmusi Maimane resigned last year, and Zille cleans up good. But all the signs are that the DA, having suffered badly in the 2019 election, is going to go back to an older persona, reaching for conservative white voters it lost to the Freedom Front Plus and trying less hard to make headway among middle-class blacks.

It is easier politics in that you can design, and then live inside, whatever your own construct of liberalism might be in SA. The black members who disagree with you are mere African nationalists. Herman Mashaba, his new party just launched, will be rubbing his hands.

It’s sad. Where it governs, the DA does so way better than the ANC, but “good management” as a policy proposition is hardly a stretch. The DA needs to find a way into more South African hearts, but neither its values debate nor its economic policy, due to be adopted this weekend, are smart or even interesting. Party activists will find that out when they start knocking on doors and try to explain new DA economic policy ahead of local elections next year.

Watching Zuma, who always fights from the shadows, being flushed out of his cover was lovely