Ramaphosa has only himself to blame as cosmic karma comes back to bite him
CYRIL Ramaphosa came into office widely touted as South Africa’s master strategist and its unrivalled conciliator. Five-and-a-half years later, both those reputations are deservedly in ruins.
The country is on its knees as measured by almost any social or economic index. The fragility of our democracy is not only more evident, but the social cohesion necessary to sustain democracy has eroded alarmingly.
When he ousted the corrupt and useless Jacob Zuma, he was hailed across the political spectrum. In effect, he had at his command a government of national unity.
But he blew it completely. At every turn, he sacrificed the longterm interests of the nation to instead favour the narrow and often dishonest positions of the ANC.
His primary mission, he has told us repeatedly since 2018 – and the nation should have taken him at his word – was to keep the ANC united at all costs. So while it was Zuma who set the house alight, it was Ramaphosa who, focused solely on rescuing his party, failed to douse the flames.
And it’s all been to no avail. He has sacrificed the country but through his actions has also accelerated the decline of his party.
In a deeply satisfying manifestation of cosmic karma, Ramaphosa has inadvertently and single-handedly done more to destroy the ANC over half a dozen years than the combined efforts of all the opposition groupings have achieved in three decades.
The latest polls suggest that almost one in three of the ANC voters who gave him his governing mandate in 2019 will switch to another party in May. The ANC has been rocked by three successive surveys that peg its support somewhere between the mid-30s and mid-40s. In KwaZulu-Natal, all three surveys have the ANC at a catastrophic 11% to 13%.
Instead, they will be voting for Zuma, with the four-month-old uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party estimated to be at 10% to 15%.
This week, further compounding Ramaphosa’s undoubted anguish, the Electoral Court overturned the decision by the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) to remove Zuma from MK’s electoral list, asserting that his candidature was unlawful because of a 15-month jail sentence for contempt of court.
It rubs salt in the wounds inflicted on Ramaphosa just a week earlier by the same Electoral Court, which dismissed an ANC application to have the MK’s electoral registration declared unlawful.
The final spin of the tumblers needed to score an MK trifecta is a judgment awaited in the Durban High Court. There the ANC argued that it held copyright on the MK name and symbols.
Unfortunately for the ANC, it never registered a trademark on the name of its now disbanded armed wing, nor did it timeously object to the IEC’s registration of MK’s name and logo. Given this and the onerous burden that would be placed on MK, were it at this late stage be compelled to change its name and reprint and reissue all its posters and propaganda, the judicial odds are definitely in MK’s favour.
The situation that the ANC finds itself in is not because of an unforeseen event, the political equivalent of the insurers’ Act of God. Rather, it results from the naiveté and lack of backbone of Ramaphosa in acting against the criminal elements in his party.
In another act of cosmic karma, the pliancy of CR’s moral spine has led to him biting himself in the arse.
It is Ramaphosa who has done nothing to fast-track the prosecution of ANC bigwigs implicated by the Zondo judicial inquiry as having looted the state.
It is Ramaphosa who by tacit complicity in Zuma’s medical parole – it’s simply not believable that the Correctional Services minister and hence Ramaphosa, was not forewarned – has unshackled his own nemesis.
It is Ramaphosa who granted the conveniently timed nationwide remission of sentence that spared Zuma from having to go to jail when the parole was overturned judicially. It is Ramaphosa who tolerated the failure of the National Prosecuting Authority to prosecute any of the RET ringleaders of the July 2021 insurrection in which at least 355 people died and R50billion of infrastructural damage was done, further strengthening the Zuma faction’s sense of immunity.
And, for goodness sake, it’s the ANC of which Ramaphosa is the national leader, which bizarrely has suspended Zuma from the party, but has not yet dared to expel him. How useful for Zuma when, post-election, he makes a reverse takeover bid for the ANC which he once said would rule until Jesus returns.
Unless the Rapture occurs over the next decade or so, Zuma may have it right. While very few commentators see the ANC surviving beyond the 2029 election, that could change should the soft-left ANC team up nationally with their hard-left offspring lurking in the basement.
The arithmetic is straightforward. Take the ANC’s predicted 35%45%, add in 10%-15% for MK and 9%-16% for the EFF. Such a coalition would have at least a comfortable majority, around what Ramaphosa managed in 2019. With all cylinders firing, it could match Mbeki’s 2009 achievement of a two-thirds, Constitution-changing majority.
In other words, the centre-right opposition parties may by exception win provinces singly, as the DA has done in the Western Cape. And conceivably they could collectively, through the Multi-Party Charter, win Gauteng and KZN provinces.
However, despite 30 years of valiant effort, the centre-right bloc is as far from outright national victory as it ever was.