Ramaphosa is the best that ANC can offer

Almost three years into President Cyril Ramaphosa’s promised new dawn, yet barely a crack of light is to be seen over the horizon.

In every way, he continues to move at glacial pace. It has taken him seven months to replace a minister in the presidency who died and almost as long to force the resignation of a health minister immersed in a corruption scandal.

This week’s Cabinet reshuffle brings the country’s spies directly under his control, but leaves a slew of inept and dangerous ministers untouched, including Bheki Cele, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Gwede Mantashe, Ebrahim Patel, Angie Motshekga and Fikile Mbalula. This is no dream team.

Given how little Ramaphosa has achieved, the durability of his popularity is impressive. Perhaps this unusual behaviour is a political manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder. We cling to kindly Uncle Cyril’s reassuring knee because we still experience nightmarish flashbacks to the traumatic years of institutional rape and pillage by former president Jacob Zuma’s barbarian hordes.

The Ramaphosa backers, however, would argue that although the president has failed to reverse this inherited institutional collapse, at least his government has not behaved like a marauding army or a plague of locusts.

The moribund state of the nation is not because of Ramaphosa’s ineptness and timidity but, rather, a necessary staging post as he cements his power within the ANC, they explain. It’s a fruitlessly circular argument.

We need to take on board that this is a government whose one consistency is its determination to cling to archaic social and economic models.

We also need to accept that this is a populace in penury, entirely and increasingly dependent on government handouts to survive. The worse the economy gets, paradoxically, the stronger the ANC’s attraction.

Whatever the immediate reasons for Ramaphosa’s resilient reputation, his backers have it right. He probably is the best leader that the ANC has had since Nelson Mandela.

This brings the sobering realisation of the essence of the SA tragedy – this is as good as it is going to be. After 27 years in power, three of them under Ramaphosa, we are experiencing the very best that an ANC government can deliver.

It is difficult to overstate the gravity of the situation. The ANC is irretrievably divided but neither side can contemplate a split. They’re in a death embrace that will drag us all down.

The gap between the radical economic transformation faction and the Ramaphosa reformists cannot be bridged. At least, not likely in any compromise that would deliver a modern, democratic and efficient state.

So, for South Africa to survive as a nation one would be proud to live in, the Ramaphosa group has to win decisively.

Although Ramaphosa has through a process of organisational attrition sufficiently loosened the grip of the Zuma-ites, that is not enough. To eradicate their pernicious effect, they would have to be expelled. That is simply inconceivable
to Ramaphosa.

For the Zuma-ites, however, a draw will suffice. Under a political stalemate, it will then be able to plunder the state, as it indeed has continued to do for all of the Ramaphosa era, albeit in a less brazen fashion.

Zuma brought South Africa to its knees. Ramaphosa, as it is playing out at the moment, will at best keep us from collapsing face down into the dirt.