Phala cloud won’t sink Ramaphosa

One wonders if President Cyril Ramaphosa and his political or image advisors have heard of the old saying “there’s no smoke without fire”.

Many people, including those who supported him, now believe there must be some sort of illegal fire behind the smoke of the Phala Phala saga involving the president. Why has it taken so long for him to “take the nation into his confidence”, as the pundits would put it?

Surely, the logic goes, an innocent man would have nothing to hide and would have played open cards as soon as the ANC’s RET (radical economic transformation) faction’s Arthur Fraser launched this obvious attempt at preventing Ramaphosa from triumphing at the party’s elective conference next month.

All Ramaphosa has done through ducking and diving over the issue of the burglary at his game farm – and the fact that foreign currency was stolen – is give ammunition to his enemies.

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Over the weekend, at the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) meeting, there was a concerted attempt to force him to “step aside” because of the cloud hanging over him. And therein lies the reality: this is merely a cloud of suspicion, Ramaphosa has neither been legally charged with breaking any law, nor has the ANC’s integrity commission summonsed him to answer.

So, why should he step aside? He appears to have fought back strongly during the NEC debate, warding off attempts to get him to stand down.

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This means his RET opponents – who are on a massive public relations drive at the moment – are going to have to go head-to-head with him at Nasrec in a few weeks. And, although “the buffalo” may have taken some flesh wounds from Phala Phala, he is still hardly about to collapse, with most provinces still supporting him. We may yet see the real Ramaphosa fire.