This was the president asking for the judge’s help

There’s a lot to be said for a head of state placing himself voluntarily before a public commission of inquiry, which requires him to take responsibility for wide-scale looting of public funds under the ANC, weapons-grade poor governance, rank mismanagement and extensive incompetence.

President Cyril Ramaphosa did himself no harm in his two days of testimony before deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo this week. He didn’t do SA any harm, either. His mere appearance at such an event does our credentials as a democracy no end of good.

In a world of increasingly harsh, dictatorial, bullying populist and nationalist leaders, Ramaphosa’s basic decency and good humour are challenges for political opponents both in and outside his own party.

Of course, he was treated with too much deference. And he was not even sitting there as president of the country — that will come in a further two days of testimony later this month, when hopefully the commission’s blades will be sharper. Ramaphosa was sitting there, it must be understood, for his party.

He was explaining it and defending it and whatever weaknesses he conceded about it were in the past. His mission is to keep the ANC united, just as John Steenhuisen’s is to keep the DA united, and he did a decent job of it. If you’re a critic, it obviously wasn’t nearly enough. But then he probably wasn’t talking to you.

But Ramaphosa was also doing something almost subversive. He was asking Raymond Zondo for help. Just as he needs the National Prosecuting Authority to put rotten ANC leaders behind bars, Ramaphosa needs Zondo to do his job and, when he finally reports, to completely rewrite the rule book on how the party and the state should interact.

Instead of having to impose new rules on how the party tries to run the state, he needs

Zondo to do it for him. He will

“overlay” Zondo onto what he is already trying to do.

It was most clear on the first afternoon of Ramaphosa’s testimony.

He was being asked how the

ANC’s deployment committee worked and gave a series of rambling answers about how the committee recommends, how ministers come with a name for the new CEO of a state-owned utility even though the board of the utility has its own name. He was, as is his party, all over the place but basically, he said, the deployment committee recommends and does not insist.

Ramaphosa knows this is mostly nonsense and so do most of the rest of us. Not that everything runs in a straight line here, but if the party wants something, it usually gets it.

It means that if you are currently the chair or on the board of an Eskom or a Transnet or an SA Airways, no matter how high your own levels of self-confidence, you are there because the ANC put you there. Sorry. So don’t complain when things go rotten. Which they will.

I was amused by his faith in his ministers. Explaining the ANC deployment committee, he said ministers are really influential because they know what they’re doing. As their boss, he has to say this sort of thing.

Which is where he needs Zondo’s help. This stuff has to stop. Last time I checked, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan had just chosen a new interim CEO for SAA who doesn’t want the job for too long and plans to do a PhD.

And for good measure, Ramaphosa told Zondo, the ANC deployment committee members are jolly smart people.

There are women on the committee, he said. And the “youth” are on it too. I waited for evidence of expertise and/or experience, but he drifted off.

Zondo can make history here. He must insist, in his final report, that neither the ANC nor any structure of the ANC as a party can be involved in any way in appointments of any kind at any entity owned or controlled by the state or in which it has an interest. Ministers and officials would remain fair political game.

But all SOE appointments should be run through parliament, and proof of any party involvement should be sufficient to render any such appointment null and void. I don’t know how you word a whole new ethical charter for SA’s politics but the judge is a clever man and I trust him.

Writing this charter, it became clear to me listening to Ramaphosa, is Raymond Zondo’s real job. The NPA can deal with the state capturers. Zondo needs to deal with the future, not the past, and find a way to comprehensively separate party and state, to drain our swamp.

And if Ramaphosa really is the reformer he wants to be, he’ll try to do what the judge eventually asks of him.

I don’t know how you word a whole new ethical charter for SA but the judge is a clever man. I trust him