Cyril comes out of hibernation

It would be churlish to deny that President Cyril Ramaphosa has just had one of his better weeks in office. He not only survived an ANC national executive meeting (NEC) that some had predicted might trigger his recall, but he managed to force powerful politicians facing criminal charges to withdraw from leadership positions.

He is also once more the man upon whom great hopes of ending that rampant criminality that exists within the ranks of the party and government. Both these achievements are less impressive than they are painted to be.

Given Ramaphosa’s unrivalled personal popularity and the powers of reward or exclusion that any president has over his colleagues, he has always been more powerful than he has behaved. And the president acts now less out of moral conviction than out of political necessity.

The national outrage over the billions of rands stolen from emergency pandemic relief funds has placed the ANC in a quandary. If it ignores the public clamour for action, it faces the real possibility of a thrashing in next year’s local government elections. In Ramaphosa’s letter to ANC members last week, the letter in which he conceded that the party was in the corruption dock as accused number one, he made a number of substantive suggestions on how to address the rot.

The first was that any ANC cadre implicated in corruption would have to report themselves to the party’s integrity commission. Those unable to bluff their way past this ambitiously titled but historically ineffectual body would have to step down or be summarily suspended.

Following the NEC meeting, a handful of the most blatant offenders have now done so. This is being hailed as a political turning point in the battle against corruption, the first step by Ramaphosa towards a revival in SA’s fortunes.

That we get excited about this small gesture is a measure of how far we have sunk. It is the norm in any democracy worth emulating that substantive allegations – not charges – of wrongdoing will trigger the person’s withdrawal from office until the matter is resolved.

The other anticorruption measures that Ramaphosa proposes are lifestyle audits, declarations of financial interests and a policy on ANC leaders and family members doing business with government. These have all been promised by the ANC many times before. What strikes one, reading he publicly released Covid-19 tenders, is how blatant the malfeasance was. Such brazen behaviour stems not from stupidity, but confidence.

These fraudsters have been operating for decades, unscathed after 26 years of the auditor-general identifying each year in his annual report gross levels of state corruption. They have survived scores of official inquiries, forensic audits and criminal investigations.

If Ramaphosa is serious about corruption, his government will simply implement the mechanisms that are already in existence but that it has ignored. One hopes this is the case but on past performance, we should be sceptical. A straw in the wind is the attitude of his influential tripartite alliance partner, the SA Communist Party (SACP).

The solution, says the SACP, is ending the tender system itself: “All outsourced services must be reviewed, to implement insourcing and decent work.”

In other words, enlarge the already bloated public service. Of course, most of the new employees will be incompetent and lazy, hired largely on skin colour and party affiliation. Which means, as is the case now, critical functions and services will have to be tendered out…

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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