It’s Zondo Part Three that matters most

ANOTHER Zondo report. Yawn.

Not because it’s not important. It’s a yawn because we all know that the moment the esteemed deputy chief justice handed yet another damning indictment of the governing party shenanigans to the president, it instantly became irrelevant.

The list of ANC deployees, ministers and officials implicated continues to expand.

They join the dozens named in Zondo Part One. And at the centre of it all, like a malevolent spider, former president Jacob Zuma.

Since the Zondo reports, have, so far, made not a single mention of Cyril Ramaphosa in the rape and pillage of the country, it is easy to forget that he sat at the Chief Spider’s side during the four worst years of state capture.

The National Prosecuting Authority appears to be gridlocked. After three years in the top job, Director Shamila Batohi’s excuses are threadbare and one must wonder whether she’s simply not up to the job and that Ramaphosa appointed her for exactly that reason.

A simple example illustrates the hopelessly compromised nature of Ramaphosa’s “necessary steps”.

In any democracy worthy of its name, Ntshavheni and Mantashe would have resigned immediately upon being fingered in a judicial inquiry for dishonesty.

The findings against Mantashe are particularly serious.

The former secretary-general of the ANC is implicated in paving the way for the capture of the Transnet board in order to loot the R300 billion locomotive procurement fund.

Mantashe is eviscerated with disarming politeness by Zondo. He describes Mantashe’s testimony as “implausible and inconsistent with the facts”, “not credible” and “fiction”.

Mantashe is serenely unperturbed by Zondo, confident of his indispensability to Ramaphosa’s political survival. The Zondo report, he says, shouldn’t be used to settle party scores, but be used “to correct the mistakes we have committed” and to rebuild the ANC.

The ANC has appointed a “task team” to deal with the report.

Expect delay and prevarication as the president tries to ride out the months to the ANC’s December conference that will either confirm him as the party’s choice for a second term or ignominiously recall him.

But it is the third report that really matters. This has the potential to be explosive in its effects on the ANC’s policy of cadre deployment, as well as on the credibility of Ramaphosa.

A substantial part of Ramaphosa’s testimony under oath related to the ANC’s cadre deployment policies, an area that the president is intimately acquainted with, since he chaired the party’s deployment committee between 2012 and 2017.

The minutes for these specific years but not those before or after Ramaphosa implausibly told the commission, were not available because they’d been lost.

If Zondo rules that cadre deployment should be outlawed, he will cripple the ANC’s power to use every institution and entity in South Africa to ensure its survival and he can kiss goodbye any chance of being appointed to the position he so richly deserves, chief justice.