Is it Cyril the tiger, or the pussy?

Stop the nosedive. Step back from the abyss. Don’t crash into the buffers.

The metaphors are irretrievably hackneyed and boil down to the same thing: survival. For at least a decade, the public conversation has been around what South Africa must do to elude apparently imminent disaster.

With the arch villain, Jacob Zuma, consigned to the outer darkness of Nkandla, President Cyril Ramaphosa was anointed to the starring role of superhero in this docudrama. But saving an entire nation is an unlikely casting for an avuncular billionaire.

CR simply may not be tough enough. His lack of resilience was cruelly exposed as far back as 1998, in the contest to be Nelson Mandela’s successor, where he was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by Thabo Mbeki. When, a couple of years later, he again tried to throw his hat into the ring, Mbeki effortlessly routed him again.

His greatest strength, according to his acolytes, is his talent at being “inclusive” and they cite his role in the Codesa negotiations that delivered the peaceful surrender of white power.

But SA has changed substantially since the ’90s. Given the dire situation the country is in, an endless negotiating of compromises that skirt around realities will no longer suffice.

Ramaphosa’s consummate negotiating skills might hold the ANC alliance together through a two-term presidency. But the priority now is to save the country and for that, some bare-knuckle fighting is necessary.

I wrote last week an important test would be the ANC national executive committee meeting that’s just taken place. CR had to ensure that Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s recently proposed economic reforms were accepted as policy.

That’s not how it played.

After four days of wrangling, the NEC decided the microeconomic aspects of the Treasury’s strategic plan would be implemented but none of the macro aspects of labour market reform and substantive interventions in the SOEs. In other words, the paralysing ANC fudging of key differences continues.

Ramaphosa’s supporters see the fudge not as an indication of CR’s weakness, but entirely necessary. By this analysis, Ramaphosa, above all else, has to continue to survive as president.

We are assured that this reluctance to confront his opponents does not indicate a lack of presidential resolve. BusinessLive’s Peter Bruce insisted this week, in a column headlined that Ramaphosa has “a tiger in his tank, not a kitten”, that CR’s is quietly positioning himself for the “bigger moment … a major confrontation”.

Presumably, when the moment is right – and ignoring for a moment the inconvenient fact that tigers don’t occur in Africa – CR will shed his Puss in Boots costume and his habitual purr, instead emerging as a ferocious, roaring carnivore, to rip his hard-left tormentors to shreds.

What appears to be prevarication and obfuscation will be proved to have been guile and strategic genius.

The problem is, unfortunately, a lack of time. SA has already lost two years to Ramaphosa’s supposed “long game”. We cannot wait for 2023, for if and when he has secured a second term, for him to act.

That makes for a dangerous and depressing possibility. It may be that, like Zimbabwe, a SA disaster will occur before the ANC will face reality.

It’s unfortunate that, along with the ANC, the entire populace has to survive the life-changing ordeal.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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