Ramaphosa must use the time fruitfully and try to redeem his image

Throughout the 55th national conference of the ANC, its spokesperson, Pule Mabe, has been at pains trying to convince the public that all is in order and the conference will begin on time and end at the intended time.

But the reality is that the party that has been ruling SA for 28 years took over a day to simply get over 4 000 delegates seated. It took them over a day to verify the credentials of people who are members of the ANC in good standing.

That is the leadership the country has entrusted to solve complex situations such as load shedding.

This organisation has overseen the steady destruction of state-owned enterprises over almost three decades. But that’s not the worst that it has done. The worst is taking the country to the point of having to bear with heavily compromised leaders. Leaders who will not take responsibility for gruesome atrocities that happened on their watch.

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The country does not have to go back a long way to find evidence that under President Cyril Ramaphosa, there was spectacular looting of funds that were meant to provide relief for the country during the hardest of lockdowns necessitated by the Covid pandemic. Dr Zweli Mkhize was his health minister at the time.

The election of the country’s next president came down to choosing between leaders who could neither get the state electricity supply utility to move just one step in the right direction, nor properly organise the response to the Covid pandemic.

In any other democracy, none of these leaders would be allowed anywhere close to the president’s office.

The reason the country is at this point is because leadership contention within the ANC is no longer dependent on the calibre of the leader in question, but more on which faction the leader belongs to.

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This is where it becomes downright depressing for the country: the faction that is led by the biggest province in the ruling party, KwaZulu-Natal, is one that was born on the back of supporting a former president who oversaw the worst looting of state funds since democracy.

The leadership that emerged in the KZN provincial conference has never hidden the fact that they are fully behind former president Jacob Zuma. Their rallying cry “Wenzeni uZuma” (What has Zuma done to be treated this way?) still reverberates in conference halls whenever Zuma makes an appearance.

And their real contention is not that the former president is innocent of all he’s being accused of, but that he has done nothing wrong or different from the rest of his comrades. In other words, “he is not more corrupt than the others”.

The only positive thing that has come out of the whole exercise is that, amid all the negativity surrounding the president and his Phala Phala scandal, he was voted in to continue in his role by his organisation.

This means that, for a while – no guarantee for how long – the country will be spared the wholesale looting that happened during the nine wasted years.

Whether Ramaphosa survives the full two terms depends on his party not recalling him. Not a single ANC president has survived the presidency for two full terms.

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Now that Ramaphosa has been handed this shaky mandate to continue at the helm despite the cloud that hangs over him, he must use the time fruitfully and try to redeem his image.

It will not be an easy task and he might be given the be given a very short time to do it, but he needs to try.