Cyril Covid’s biggest victim?

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro contracted Covid-19 last week. He joins a select international club: the prime ministers of Britain, Russia and Guinea-Bissau; the president of Honduras; and a sprinkling of Cabinet ministers and top politicians in virtually every country in the world. None has died.

The biggest casualty, so far, has been the dented pride of Bolsonaro, who finds himself laid low by a virus he denies exists. Astonishingly, given that the assembled ranks of this ANC administration’s Cabinet looks like a medical poster for dangerous comorbidities like obesity, aside from Gwede Mantashe none has contracted the virus.

The explanation must lie in their abstemious habits as regards alcohol and tobacco. There is, however, one top South African fatality potentially lined up: President Cyril Ramaphosa himself. Not a medical casualty, but a political one.

After a promising start when the pandemic first surfaced, Ramaphosa’s subsequently poor performance is at long last coming under some critical examination. Admittedly, the crowds still love him. But internally, within the ANC and its partners, it’s not so rosy.

It’s obvious that despite more than two years in power, he has still not managed to stamp his authority over the Zuma remnants. During the past four months of the pandemic, some of his Cabinet ministers have been overt in their disdain towards Ramaphosa, especially Police Minister Bheki Cele and the president’s archrival, Cooperative Affairs and Governance Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.

It’s forced the president into humiliating flip-flops on cigarette bans and alcohol sales, wilting like an errant schoolboy before the imperious school ma’am, Dlamini-Zuma. At least, on health issues, he can portray his weakness as evidence of an admirable openness to persuasion by expert opinion.

There is no place to hide, however, when it comes to his bending of the knee to Cele, the Cat in the Hat, and other securocrats. He has faced serial challenges and each time backed down. One can find examples of Ramaphosa’s timidity in virtually every area of his presidency.

He has no appetite for the kind of confrontation with the unions and the SA Communist Party that is necessary to close the national airline, secure alternative power generation, fire the crooks and fools that run most of the state-owned enterprises and slash the public service wage bill. It is remarkable, then, how resilient media regard has been for Ramaphosa.

With Covid-19 mercilessly highlighting the ANC’s quarter of a century of failure, his may, at last, be changing. For Daily Maverick’s commentator Ferial Haffajee, the final straw appears to have been the resumption of load shedding.

She writes: “[It] is like an X-ray revealing the weaknesses of Ramaphosa’s presidency and his inability to deliver on his promises.”

BusinessLive’s Peter Bruce is similarly disenchanted: “[Ramaphosa’s] government’s handling of the pandemic has been a lurch from one bumble to the next … For the first time I have begun to wonder whether he will in the aftermath be able to hold on to leadership of the party.”

I think Bruce is right. While it may be true Ramaphosa is the only person who could save SA, his fear of the almighty internecine battle that such a rescue would demand, means that he won’t.

He simply doesn’t have the courage. Ramaphosa will either go meekly or lead timidly.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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