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Having had his ambassador to Washington expelled because he called Trump a white supremacist, Ramaphosa has doubled down.
Mcebisi Jonas: Picture: Gallo Images / Sowetan / Thulani Mbele.
It’s difficult to decide. Is President Cyril Ramaphosa just dangerously clueless, or is his administration crumbling under the weight of events?
Having had his ambassador to Washington expelled because he called President Donald Trump a white supremacist, Ramaphosa has doubled down.
He has appointed a “special envoy” to woo that selfsame president a man who described Trump as a racist, a homophobe and a narcissist.
Given that the US looms large in all the dark clouds on the ANC’s horizon, the ineptness with which Ramaphosa has handled matters is scarcely believable.
Ebrahim Rasool’s appointment to Washington was made despite his well-documented enthusiasm for Iran’s terror proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Nor were special envoy Mcebisi Jonas’ anti-Trump sentiments, made in a public speech, exactly secret.
Ramaphosa’s spokesperson said Trump wasn’t one to hold grudges. If he did, the reasoning goes, he wouldn’t have included in his Cabinet a number of previously scathing critics.
But Trump has appointed people who were nasty about him because it’s part of the quid pro quo of politics.
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It’s not clear what the ANC government – its GNU partners have zero influence over foreign affairs – is willing to bring to a deal with Trump.
Is South Africa willing to moderate its anti-US, anti-Israel positions? That’s doubtful.
Jonas is widely considered to be one of the “good guys” in the ANC. He and the late Pravin Gordhan were the “face of resistance”, as Daily Maverick described them at the time, against the state looting of the Jacob Zuma era.
Jonas’ badge of honour from that era is that he claims to have refused a R600 million payoff by the Guptas to facilitate their crimes.
He and Gordhan have since been held up as examples of integrity and probity. Truth is, not really. Neither Jonas nor Gordhan were as heroic as the hagiographers paint them.
They were ethically compromised participants in what is an organisation riddled with criminality and that has murky ties to an array of rogue states.
The “resistance” to Zuma was never an act of honour based on moral values. If it had been, none of these men would have waited so long to challenge the criminality that they knew was rife.
The reason for their silence, of course, is that they were political opportunists. And the “resistance”, when it eventually came at the leadership conference in 2018, was an act of expedience, timed to their maximum political convenience.
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It is against this background that one must assess the belief that the likes of Jonas and Ramaphosa are “good guys” keeping the “bad” ANC in check.
They’re, at best, marginal improvements on the abysmally bad Zuma administration they were part and parcel of for almost 10 years.
The Ramaphosa era has been only marginally less corrupt than the Zuma years. And by any economic or financial measure – GDP, growth, unemployment, currency, investment – it has performed worse.
As we segue out of the Easter weekend, Ramaphosa’s Jonas headache suddenly got worse. Last Wednesday, a US court green-lighted an Anti-Terrorism Act lawsuit against Jonas’ MTN.
The allegation is that MTN traded with Iranian front companies linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), thus indirectly but knowingly supporting terrorist activities that led to thousands of US casualties in Iraq between 2011 and 2016.
The period in question predates Jonas’ chairmanship of MTN but far from lets him off the hook. As LegalBrief Africa reports: “The judgment highlighted that even after the IRGC was officially designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation in 2019, MTN retained its commercial ties.”
With this, Jonas is now probably dead in the water as special envoy. But there is value to Ramaphosa’s latest debacle.
It’s a reminder that no ANC government, even at such a critical juncture in South Africa’s history, is capable of shaking free of its ideological obsessions, nor swerving from its absolute commitment to the party above the nation.
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