Ramaphosa vows to fight for ‘nonracial’ SA and undo state capture damage

President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke at the South African National Editors’ Forum in Cape Town yesterday, thanking journalists for their role in uncovering state capture while claiming that the full extent of the problem was not known by government until the Gupta emails were leaked.

At the event, where Ramaphosa reflected on his first 100 days in office, he also expressed regret for the way the ANC had moved away from its commitment to “nonracialism”, saying he wanted all races to feel welcome and valued in South Africa.

He said the ANC had pledged to reestablish its commitment to a society not defined by racial inequality. “[…] We want to promote a country where all races feel at home in South Africa. But all races [should] feel that they have a role to play in building and developing this.”

On state capture, Ramaphosa said: “Recently you played a really good and gallant role in unravelling quite a lot of horrible things that had been happening in the country – the corruption‚ the way that it had embedded itself in the body politic of our country and the government.”

Regarding his administration’s commitment to undoing the damage, he said: “It will take some time to recalibrate and realign everything so that we can return to building good governance processes. What we can say is that this administration is determined to root out corruption.”

Ramaphosa was questioned as to why, as deputy president under Jacob Zuma, he did not do more to stop state capture at the time.

“You guys [media] were already raising a number of issues on a piecemeal basis. But when you finally prised the whole thing wide open with the Gupta emails‚ I think it became patently clear to everyone that we were dealing with a much bigger problem than we had ever imagined,” he said.

Ramaphosa claimed many in government thought that there were isolated incidents of corruption, “but when the Gupta emails came out it became clear that the wheels have actually come off completely”.

“Could I have done anything differently? Possibly‚ but we are where we are now, where we are all able to take action. We have commission that is going to look at this‚ let’s look forward to all that.”

Rather than dwell on the past, Ramaphosa stressed that things would be different moving forward. “What we promised when we came into office is that we are going to foster a clean government approach to doing things because our people deserve that, and our people expect that one would have a clean government. We have set out to deal with that and to put things right.”