If Ramaphosa is forced to step aside, he will not be the biggest loser

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Who would have ever imagined that a sitting SA president can have millions of American dollars stuffed into their furniture cabinets on a game farm in Limpopo?

Sounds like something out of a Wilbur Smith novel, with a sprinkling of the Cape Town underworld and international conspiracies going across borders to Windhoek into the Namibian presidential office.

As fantastical as it all sounds, this might turn out to be President Cyril Ramaphosa’s biggest fight of his political life. And this is a man who has survived no less than being characterised as a bloodthirsty billionaire who engineered the deaths of 44 workers in Marikana. He might, in the end, be done in by a case of theft in which he was actually the victim.

ALSO READ: DA calls on Ramaphosa to own up about $4 million robbery

The disgruntled former spy chief, Arthur Fraser, might seem like a bitter, scorned man out for revenge. But if the case he has opened against the president actually makes it onto the court roll, he will have given the radical economic transformation (RET) faction of the ruling party something tangible that they can use to get the president to step aside like he has made former secretary-general Ace Magashule do.

Sadly, if the worst were to happen and Ramaphosa is forced to step aside, he will not be the biggest loser. Voters will be the biggest losers.

The RET faction has one goal: to return to political office and regain the power to influence the structures that are working to put them in jail. But the worst nightmare for the voter will be a return to the free and unhindered looting that characterised the “lost decade”.

Ramaphosa is not the best thing that has happened to South Africa and his time in power has proven that. But he is the best alternative that the ruling party had to offer post the Jacob Zuma era.

ALSO READ: Ramaphosa refuses to provide key details of $4 million robbery

Besides mounting a commendable effort in the fight against the Covid pandemic, he has not done anything that screams to voters to fight for his continued stay in office. But his presence in the Union Buildings, even simply as a space filler, has spared South Africa of the worst.

South Africans are tolerating electricity blackouts, collapsed state-owned enterprises and inefficient policing and judiciary because they derive some comfort from being spared the kind of looting that characterised the Gupta era.

Funny how the president is crying foul: “This case is politically motivated.” The presidency is a political office and the RET faction will turn anything that looks moderately suspicious into a massive political whip that they can used against the president.

And if Fraser’s tale of domestic workers and gangsters colluding to mount a presidential heist are true, this will be one politically motivated case the president will live to regret.

When the president does finally explain, if he does come to the conclusion that he owes the people he leads some sort of coherent explanation, he needs to realise that some of the things he engages in outside of his political office actually put voters at the mercy of people who are determined to loot the country blind.

No one can stop him doing his private business deals but because he has taken an oath of office to obey and protect the constitution, he must do so, even when no one is watching. That’s the integrity that his office demands of him.