Step out of your lane and put the country first Mr president

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC 2017 campaign slogan was “Thuma Mina”, which loosely translates to “send me”.

Figuratively, it means “I volunteer to heed the call to help the people”, immortalised on the local music scene by Hugh Masekela’s hit of the same title.

It was this campaign slogan that the Economic Freedom Fighters parliamentarian, Makoti Khawula, took the mickey out of when she intimated that the ruling party was busy “sending each other to steal”.

Given the president’s admission last week at the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture that the ruling party’s deployment committee which he chaired from 2012 to 2017 did not keep minutes, Khawula’s assertion that ANC
parliamentarians were sending each other to steal is not far-fetched.

The president wants citizens to believe that the committee that moved former Eskom boss Brian Molefe from Transnet to the power utility did not keep minutes at all.

“I cannot remember ratifying minutes from a previous sitting,” he told the commission.

It is at this point that former president Jacob Zuma and other ANC leaders’ brief appearances at the commission intersects poignantly with Ramaphosa, they too used the phrase “I cannot remember or recall” when they found
themselves in sticky situations.

If the president cannot remember a single instance in which minutes were kept or ratified in a committee he chaired for five years, a committee that deployed people who oversaw billions of rands, it begs the question, what is he doing in the highest office in the land?

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South Africa’s future and Ramaphosa’s are strongly intertwined.

This country will go where he leads it, if he does lead it.

It is a question of if because there are periods in his recent political career when he has chosen to sit it out, to let things carry on the way they are carrying on because doing otherwise would wreck his own political career.

And the answer to the question that people have always been asking themselves: When Zuma was doing the Guptas’ bidding, what did Ramaphosa do within the ANC and Cabinet? “People kept to their lane…” he
said. He, too, chose to keep to his lane.

In every instant that the president decided to stay in his lane or that he knew problematic individuals were being moved because they had looted money in one state-owned enterprise (SOE) and he agreed that they moved to another SOE, he did exactly what Khawula accused the ANC of doing, “sending each other to steal money and
when they are done in this department, sending them to another department to steal some more”.

His 2017 campaign slogan might as well have been “Thuma Mina to steal”, because he took part in meetings where Gupta lieutenants were ratified for senior positions.

The president still has a chance to redeem himself over the next two years of his term. But to do that successfully would mean stepping out of his lane and saying no when people like former defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula are elevated to more powerful positions despite clouds hanging over their heads.

He would have to put the country before his own needs because playing the long haul game, like he did with the Zuma administration, can only guarantee his and the country’s demise.