SAM MKOKELI: Our tortoise-like president unlikely to reshuffle lazy, bloated cabinet

The cabinet vacancy arising from the death of minister in the presidency Jackson Mthembu creates something of a poser for President Cyril Ramaphosa. Will he make a clean, straightforward replacement, as a football coach might fill a vacancy in his team? Or will he take a hard, in-depth look at his cabinet and embark on a sweeping reshuffle?

This is Ramaphosa’s fourth calendar year at the helm, having taken over from Jacob Zuma in 2018. His leadership style and approach are well established by now, with an aversion to conflict his most apparent trait. He relies on a conciliatory, Nelson Mandela-esque process that many suspect may have frustrated even Madiba himself.

Ramaphosa’s team, dubbed CR17, made strong moves when it took power at the ANC’s Nasrec conference, pushing Zuma out of office before his term expired. And before acting on Zuma, it instructed him and his friends to extract Matshela Koko’s tentacles from Eskom. That was duly done, a blood-on-the-floor moment that sent a signal that the “New Dawn” had truly broken.

Within days, Ramaphosa was sworn in as the country’s first citizen. But the real Ramaphosa took charge, not the man who had promised good governance, efficiency and brutal rationality. His 2019 cabinet — the national executive that includes deputy ministers — was a big disappointment. It was in effect even bigger than Zuma’s, though the top tier was reduced by eight posts to 28, from 36 under Zuma.

The effect of the reductions was cancelled when Ramaphosa packed the executive with 34 deputy ministers. Deputies have no real bite — they cannot even act as ministers when the incumbent is away for some reason. These are merely high-paying jobs that come with costly mandarins and aides who collectively help presidents manage politics through patronage. SA ministers earned R2.4m in 2020, and deputies just over R2m.

In his first few months as finance minister, Tito Mboweni hinted at a number for a practical cabinet that would help cut SA’s half-a-trillion-rand wage bill. “China is a big economy, and I think they have about 25 ministers or something like that. We have no economic, financial and understandable political reason that you can have an executive that’s up to 70 people,” Mboweni said. That was 2018. Alas, four years later we still have a super-bloated cabinet.

With his aversion for conflict, Ramaphosa is not likely to do what is obviously required. He may pick a trusted lieutenant from the erstwhile CR17 group to replace Mthembu as minister in the presidency. The minister oversees the presidency itself as a department, the government performance monitoring role, the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS), Brand SA and the Media Development and Diversity Agency. The most important of these by far is the GCIS — the talking part in the communications ecosystem.

The GCIS, and the whole government communications infrastructure, represents the best and the worst of the sixth administration. It can never shine in our cabinet system with the current incoherence and state incapacity. Ramaphosa has the option of merging the communications function with the department of telecommunications, which is under Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams. This is the more lucrative department, with oversight over the telecommunications industry. It also possesses one of the potentially most effective policy tools to help our economy: bandwidth rollout. Yet the spectrum debate is stuck fast in sectoral lobbying, just like the coal-vs-renewable energy debate.

To move SA forward, Ramaphosa would have to place economic and policy objectives at the forefront. He is unlikely to do that due to political impotence and his belief that his base is shaky. He continues to squander opportunities despite truckloads of political capital and gallons of support from the public and constituencies. What encourages his hide-in-the-shell-like-a-tortoise leadership style is the absence of political consequences for him and the ANC, at least for now. He is in no political danger whatsoever, even when his government drags its feet in procuring Covid-19 vaccines. His allies could steal the entire Covid-19 budget and he would have no reason to lose sleep.

We have bred a proper unaccountable government, in a deceptive democracy. The traumas of Zuma-era corruption and the former president’s flagrant disregard for decency have benefited Ramaphosa. He need only be half decent for people to give him a chance. The Covid-19 pandemic has also disrupted the status quo, with its burden on humanity distorting public accountability expectations and creating a gap for insipid but well-mannered leaders to eke out a mediocre existence.

The GCIS needs a combination of Joel Netshitenzhe — a policy Rolls-Royce — and Zizi Kodwa’s nimble feet. But there are no signs that Netshitenzhe is even vaguely interested in a cabinet position; and Kodwa, now deputy intelligence minister, has been in the news recently for his association with questionable tenderpreneurs. His saving grace, for now, may be the absence of a smoking gun linking payments he received when he was ANC spokesperson to his using his influence to inappropriately benefit tenderpreneur Edwin Sodi. Kodwa is a dexterous political fixer of note behind the scenes. Giving him official proximity to the president would help Ramaphosa better manage the CR17 faction, which has since Nasrec lost interest in the man and his saint-like politics.

Small-business minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni is doubling up as minister in the presidency for now. It is not clear how much can be read into Ramaphosa’s choice of a stopgap, or the rationale of his choice. It would not come as a surprise if she was moved to a merged communications-telecommunications role should the president go big with a reshuffle. Underlying it all is the small matter that before too long there is likely to be a vacancy at the finance ministry, since Mboweni has made clear for some time that he has no appetite for this period in our politics.

What will Ramaphosa do? Will he consider the outcome of research he commissioned in his first year in office into government reorganisation? His followers would be shocked if he undertook a serious reorganisation of his cabinet and sent a few people packing — no-one believes his story of institutional reform any more. Ramaphosa’s preference is to talk, very decently, caringly and purposefully, like a figurehead or monarch.

• Mkokeli is a freelance journalist and politics researcher. He served as public enterprises spokesperson until late 2020.