Cyril should play the Ace

What would it take for you to believe President Cyril Ramaphosa’s assertion that the ANC has reached a turning point in the fight against corruption? How about the arrest and prosecution of secretary-general Ace Magashule? That would signal genuine intent.

South Africans are fed up with Ramaphosa’s fine words. We shall accept nothing less than “Ace in the hole”, where the hole is a prison cell. If that’s not going to happen, Ramaphosa shouldn’t waste his breath and our time. Turning point be damned. Lack of action is turning the president into an ineffectual windbag. All mouth and no trousers is the appropriate idiom for someone who talks boastfully without any ability to back up their words.

Ramaphosa’s lack of testicular fortitude was exposed when former eThekwini mayor Zandile Gumede was sworn in as a member of the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Legislature. Lamborghini-loving Gumede, who is in the Jacob Zuma/Magashule camp, previously appeared in the Durban Commercial Crimes Court on charges linked to R400 million tender fraud. Her swearing-in is thus a direct challenge to Ramaphosa’s authority in the party.

As president, he has executive authority to fire and hire ministers and senior officials. However, this authority rests on a fragile political base. In his letter to the ANC, Ramaphosa acknowledged “that across the nation there is a sense of anger and disillusionment at reports of corruption in our response to the coronavirus pandemic”.

Ramaphosa knows Gumede’s swearing-in undercuts his anticorruption message. Yet because of the ANC’s internal rules and power dynamics, he is unable to intervene in an ANC KwaZulu-Natal provincial executive decision. It is they who decided Gumede could go to the provincial legislature, where she will be paid about R1.1 million a year. To overturn this decision would require authority from the party’s national executive committee (NEC).

Ramaphosa does not have the numbers to enforce a decision to recall Gumede. And, as he recently said, he would rather be seen as a weak president “than to split the ANC because that is not my mission. My mission is to keep the ANC united”. So, because he prizes ANC unity above all else and because of internal ANC dynamics, he will not act against the likes of Magashule and Gumede. Given these realities, he should not make anticorruption pledges he cannot keep.

Anticorruption has been a theme since his 2017 campaign for the party leadership. There is little to show for all the talk. Some commentators have likened Ramaphosa’s letter to a Rubicon moment. If this is an allusion to Julius Caesar’s “the die is cast” speech when crossing the Rubicon River to start the 49BC Roman civil war, it is misplaced.

Ramaphosa’s letter has not set us on an irrevocable anticorruption path. It’s merely more of the same verbiage. A more appropriate comparison would be former SA president PW Botha’s 1985 Rubicon speech, where the apartheid leader failed to rise to the occasion. No new direction was set. Caesar’s die is the singular of dice (one die, many dice).

Ramaphosa should roll the dice. Play the Ace. Fortune favours the bold, not the timid.

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