It’s been a good week for Ramaphosa

IT’S BEEN a good week at the office for President Cyril Ramaphosa. A very good week indeed.

It will buoy those who – despite the past four years of excruciating inertia – have retained their faith that Ramaphosa would eventually deliver his promised New Dawn. Not that any luridly coloured dawn is imminent, understand, but at least CR has probably done enough to secure his party nomination to a second presidential term of peering hopefully out the window.

Ramaphosa’s victory, achieved at a reportedly heated two-day special meeting of the national executive committee (NEC), may not be, on the face of it, anything remarkable.

It merely states explicitly what is a universal practice in other democracies – that any party members charged with a criminal offence are disqualified from election to any position within the organisation.

However, in an ANC that over the past decade or so has metamorphosed into a criminal mafia, this is a major step. At a stroke, it negates much of the political threat to Ramaphosa and his “reformists” from the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) cabal clustered around former president Jacob Zuma.

Many in the RET, including its most popular figures, have either been criminally charged or face the very real prospect of this happening. As Bathabile Dlamini, the spectacularly useless former minister of social development and president of the ANC’s Women’s League (ANCWL) once confessed, behind the facade of party unity lies a fear of suicidal mayhem being unleashed if the truth were to out.

“All of us in the NEC have our smallanyana (tiny little) skeletons,” she warned. “We don’t want to take all skeletons out because hell will break loose.”

This reality was tacitly recognised by the party’s reformists, who loudly condemned ANC corruption yet did everything possible to avoid confronting it.

Hence an ANC regulation that criminally charged office-bearers should voluntarily step aside until their cases were decided by the courts. Not surprisingly, those accused clung like limpets to the cupboard walls, arguing that this was a ploy to prevent Ramaphosa’s political opponents from challenging him in December.

They were, of course, right. When Ace Magashule, the ANC’s powerful secretary-general and a key ally of Zuma, refused to step aside after being charged with fraud and corruption, he was eventually suspended.

With this week’s NEC decision, which had delegates at loggerheads into the early hours of the morning, the advantage moves further in Ramaphosa’s direction.

Ramaphosa’s skill has been to prevent all hell from breaking loose during the exhumation process.

He has managed, so far, to ensure that the relatively few skeletons that have tumbled into public view have overwhelmingly been those of his enemies and that the process has been executed with finesse – enough skeletons to cause RET disarray but not enough to suggest the kind of full-scale house cleaning that would trigger a cross-factional rebellion against the president.

In this regard, it has suited Ramaphosa well that the National Prosecuting Authority has ostensibly struggled to mount prosecutions of any of the close to 1 500 persons and entities implicated in criminality before the Zondo Commission.

When selected prosecutions are mounted in the coming months, as the NPA hints will happen, they will act as a further effective dampener on RET efforts to recall Ramaphosa in December.

The decision on criminal leaders was not Ramaphosa’s only success this week.

The NEC also accepted a report recommending that the ANCWL – under the presidency of smallanyana Dlamini, a festering thorn in Ramaphosa’s side – be disbanded as it was “fractured” and “dysfunctional”.

It will be replaced with a task team that has as its goal the convening of the league’s repeatedly delayed annual conference and, no doubt, a leadership slate that removes it from the control of the RET forces.

Dlamini, another Zuma sidekick, is likely to find herself on the leadership scrapheap.

Ramaphosa has spent his entire first term stalking his second term. With these developments, that goal seems firmly within his grasp.

Then will come the real test of his mettle. For the ultimate goal, surely, is not just to be repeatedly elected, but to use that power for the national good.