Tussle to oust Ramaphosa is starting to look ugly

Ordinarily, we would welcome the news that President Cyril Ramaphosa will not go to the global capitalist thinktank at Davos this year.

He’s been away so often in the last year – as things in the country go from bad to worse – that he looks like a leader jetting while home burns.

It appears that this weekend, he and his ANC colleagues are putting their collective heads together to discuss the fate of Eskom and South African Airways, our star state-owned enterprise failures.

While we hope the bosberaad does start to take the hard decisions needed to save these sinking ships, there is also a more worrying aspect to the fact Ramaphosa is staying home.

Turning his back on his political comrades is inviting one, or more, of them, to plunge the knife into him. Already the coalition of trough feeders around Jacob Zuma – led by Ace Magashule and now bolstered apparently by deputy president DD Mabuza, along with other ANC luminaries like Lindiwe Sisulu and party treasurer Paul Mashatile – is becoming more bold in its “fightback” campaign to oust Ramaphosa and reverse the decisions at the ANC Nasrec conference in 2017.

And that tussle is starting to look ugly.

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