The moment of truth has arrived for President Cyril Ramaphosa who will on Wednesday morning be obliged to put the national interest above his own or that of the governing ANC.
Ramaphosa will be under oath when he delivers an opening statement and then answers questions at the state capture inquiry in front of deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo. The issue of cadre deployment is one that Ramaphosa can expect to be front and centre over the next two days as he accounts for his time as ANC deputy president under Jacob Zuma. As head of the ANC deployment committee, Ramaphosa would have had opportunity for significant input into who the party recommended for government employment.
But just how much Ramaphosa knew since he walked back into political office is unclear. Having served as secretary-general of the ANC, Nelson Mandela’s departure as party president in 1997 saw Ramaphosa forced into retirement from active politics. Zuma plucked him from political obscurity in 2012, while he was building a business empire.
EFF leader Julius Malema’s expulsion from the ANC in 2012 and Ramaphosa’s insistence as a shareholder of mining company Lonmin that the state take strong action against striking workers in Marikana that same year, preceded Zuma’s decision to fetch Ramaphosa and lend him his support for his re-entry into the ANC top brass in 2012.
With Zuma being elected for a second term as ANC president in an overwhelming victory with 80% of the vote, at that same ANC national conference in Mangaung, Free State, there would have been little doubt in Ramaphosa’s mind where the power lay.
Zuma’s re-election so emboldened him that it is unclear how much Ramaphosa knew as his deputy or as the head of the ANC’s deployment committee. In 2012 Dudu Myeni was appointed as SAA chair; this led to the sharp decline of the national carrier. In 2013, the Gupta family landed a plane of wedding guests at Waterkloof Air Force Base, in defiance of national security.
Former ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe is on record as saying that this was the first time the ANC realised what influence the Guptas had over Zuma. Several high-ranking ANC politicians including Fikile Mbalula, Vytjie Mentor and Mcebisi Jonas, and public servants such as Themba Maseko have told Zondo that they were summoned to do the Guptas’ bidding, and were fired for having refused.
In the years after ministers were apparently expected to be pawns in the state capture project. The budgets of provincial governments, the budgets of state-owned enterprises, such as SAA, Prasa, Denel and Eskom, were redirected to benefit Gupta-owned companies. The State Security Agency (SSA) had its mandate changed from service to the national interest to include the protection of the president, then Zuma.
Criminal justice institutions such as the SAPS and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) were weakened and the SA Revenue Service (Sars), parliament and labour federation Cosatu were stripped of any threat. Ramaphosa’s tone and how much he is willing to disclose will affect Zondo’s ultimate conclusion about Zuma.
Zondo, who has been subject to political attack by those aligned to Zuma, must in his final report draw conclusions on the architecture of the state capture and in the architect and has the power to recommend criminal prosecution but also give immunity from prosecution to those who come clean.
State capture, which allegedly involved Zuma ceding much of his powers, such as those to appoint ministers, to the Guptas allegedly cost SA R1.5-trillion and subjected the country to “nine wasted years” in which the economy barely grew and unemployment rose.
If Ramaphosa takes the same approach as National Assembly speaker Thandi Modise, who said parliament, which is supposed to exercise executive oversight, “did not know”, it will further cement the conflation of party and state, which has become a growing challenge in SA’s constitutional democracy.
Zuma appointed Ramaphosa as deputy president of the country in 2014 and they sat side by side in cabinet meetings, which took far-reaching decisions to make state capture possible. This all happened far before Zuma fired Pravin Gordhan as finance minister in 2017, in an apparent attempt to push through a nuclear deal.
That sparked a revolt that saw Ramaphosa rise to the ANC presidency later that year. But what of SA going into an economic recession, the ANC decline in electoral support, which saw it lose metros in the 2016 municipal poll, the sharp rise in the state’s debt to GDP ratio, the downgrading of profitable SOEs to junk credit status, the securitisation of the state, including parliament, and stacks of media reports all pointing the finger at Zuma and the Guptas.
Ramaphosa and the ANC saying they did not know and denying any responsibility will do little to undo the reputational damage to the party or to the country internationally that state capture caused.
The state and the economy were decimated under Zuma, what Ramaphosa says could inspire hope and open a path for recovery.
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