It’s ironic that the RET faction’s best ally turns out to be Ramaphosa

Last week’s ANC policy conference was a reminder of the growing disconnect between the party and the people.

The country’s ruling elite live in a world far removed from the grim realities of most South Africans.

The gap is now so great that it appears to be bridgeable by neither empathy, nor intelligence.

And the ANC appears to have given up trying. After 28 years in power, it is tired, divided and uninspiring.

Cyril Ramaphosa, who was supposed to reinvigorate the party after the damage done during his predecessor’s presidency, is visibly dispirited. He has good reason.

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While the party endorsed, against the resistance of the contingent from KwaZulu-Natal, his stand-aside rule for those members criminally charged, it is a double-edged sword.

It potentially neutralises Ramaphosa’s most potent challengers at December’s leadership conference, but can equally abruptly end his hopes of a second term if he is charged in connection with the bizarre Farmgate scandal.

So it has become a juggling act, with the president desperately trying to keep the power balls in play for the next five months, while the other political performers try to trip him. It’s worked so far, but the pressure is building.

Speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula this week missed her own deadline on whether to set up a committee to probe Farmgate.

Her office announced that, due to unexplained delays, she would need more time.

Seven of the opposition parties have joined forces to hold Ramaphosa accountable as a matter of urgency, without “distractions and procrastination”.

Aside from the parliamentary inquiry, they want the acting public protector to make public the president’s responses to that office’s questions on the matter.

The president tried his best at the conference to deliver his trademark rah-rah optimism. However, with the growing Farmgate storm, the cheerleading looked forced and unconvincing.

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It is also wearing threadbare. The man who in 2019 was embraced by corporates and middle classes as the safe hands against the party’s destructive populists is showing his true colours.

Three years ago, it was the Ramaphosa grouping, vying for the leadership against former president Jacob Zuma’s radical economic transformation (RET) faction, that argued against a policy of land expropriation without compensation.

The radicals triumphed by the narrowest of margins. This time, it was Ramaphosa who led the charge.

“We must use available means, including the new Expropriation Bill, to accelerate land redistribution.”

To complete Ramaphosa’s expedient about face and embrace of populism, he backed the nationalisation of the SA Reserve Bank (SARB).

This was the other issue on which the radicals had pushed in 2019, but it had fallen by the wayside under the pressure of real crises – blackouts, SOEs in financial collapse, attempted insurrections, natural disasters, a surge in criminal violence and endemic service protests.

Now, according to Ramaphosa, the private ownership of the Reserve Bank is a “historic anomaly” and the people should fully own it.

It’s ironic that the RET group’s best ally turns out to be Ramaphosa.

But as Groucho Marx supposedly said: “These are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

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