Cyril is on the brink of disaster

The laying of serious criminal complaints against a sitting president by his former security chief would be high drama anywhere in the world. In South Africa, it also throws up one of those bizarre paradoxes that this country specialises in.

President Cyril Ramaphosa, when it’s boiled down to the nitty-gritty, faces criminal sanctions and political ignominy for the burglary, from his own home, of his own money. In contrast, president Jacob Zuma, who facilitated the decade-long looting of a trillion rands of taxpayer money, has not only eluded justice, but remains politically influential.

Zuma, despite his seedy personal life and dismal presidential record, remains a force behind the scenes in the ANC. He’s the malevolent spider at the centre of the party’s radical economic transformation (RET) faction, which has benefitted from growing public disorder and violence.

Ramaphosa, however, stands on the brink of disaster. If charged with any serious offence arising from the unreported burgling of a claimed $4 million from his Limpopo game ranch, never mind convicted, his career will lie in ashes.

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Most seriously for the country, he will have to step aside as leader of the party and the country and his successor will in December be decided, in large measure, by a resurgent Zuma and the RET. None of this is the result of the ebb and flow of random circumstances. It’s a perfectly timed move by the RET faction, just at the moment when Ramaphosa’s progression towards a December-mandated second term seemed inevitable. It has also been helped along enormously by Ramaphosa’s stupendously foolish actions.

Arthur Fraser’s complaint has RET fingerprints all over it. Fraser was fired by Ramaphosa from heading the corrupt State Security Agency and, in a classic placatory Ramaphosa gesture, was given the job of national commissioner of correctional services.

As a reward, Fraser personally engineered Zuma getting medical parole from his jail sentence imposed by the Constitutional Court. Now, even the most inept vultures are beginning to circle.

Before she was suspended, Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane had announced that she, too, is going to investigate Ramaphosa’s alleged crimes. Given her record of judicially rejected reports, this is one investigation that the president should have embraced. Some of the president’s nominal allies are also savouring the possibilities that a Ramaphosa exit would provide.

Deputy President David Mabuza put a thin stiletto into the president’s side during a parliamentary debate on the matter on Wednesday. Responding to the strident calls by the Economic Freedom Fighters for Ramaphosa to step aside, Mabuza was hardly fulsome in the defence of his leader. “I don’t think we have reached that point,” he said in a carefully precise reply. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Ramaphosa’s virtues.

Ramaphosa has always been seen as serving as a bulwark against a grisly rogues’ gallery of presidential hopefuls. In other words, we have to cherish and protect Ramaphosa, since this is as good as it can get under an ANC government after nearly three decades of striving. The danger to the ANC is of Ramaphosa now being shown to be just another ANC crook, albeit a charming one.

As Melanie Verwoerd, a lifelong party cadre who served as SA’s ambassador to Ireland, wrote in her News24 column this week, “I will really be devastated if it turns out that the president has knowingly done something illegal.”

But there is an as-yet unexplored upside of the incident. It explodes for once and all the myth of “good” ANC and “bad” ANC. They’re rotten to the core and Ramaphosa has been, and continues to be, party to, and facilitator of, that rot. Since there’s very little ANC apple left when the bad bits are excised, throw it out. Choose a different one.