Not only did President Cyril Ramaphosa’s testimony at the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture last week confirm what we already knew — that he is a man of precious little action — it also revealed that he considers this inaction to be one of his smartest attributes. Not doing anything about state capture when the rot became evident was apparently a shrewd tactical move, as it allowed him to remain undetected and unfired in the ANC’s mob organisation, like some undercover agent.
Can you imagine if the same justification for doing nothing, despite knowing everything, had been offered up anywhere other than at the apex of this ANC government? If, for instance, a board member of a large corporation knew that fellow board members were defrauding shareholders but remained silent? Or if a school’s deputy principal knew the principal and a bunch of teachers were pocketing school funds and said nothing?
We would not stand for flimsy protestations of “biding his time” or “waiting for the right moment” or “trying to fight the rot from within”. But Ramaphosa has somehow turned years of inaction as Jacob Zuma’s deputy, followed by even more years of inaction as president, into some kind of reformer’s strategy. And several media commentators have bought it – hook, line and sinker. “Ah, but he’s playing the long game,” we’re told. “If they’d replaced him with someone else we’d probably be even worse off now.”
And so you and I and every other South African is expected to accept this wait-and-see complicity from a then deputy president, and now sitting president, because the ANC’s only other alternative is full-blown, out-in-the-open looting.
The ANC clearly has several intersecting afflictions that have been laid bare in Ramaphosa’s Zondo testimony. The first is that its cadre deployment policy has caused irreparable damage to our democracy, our economy and our hope for a better future. This can no longer be disputed, and it is encouraging to see media commentators finally calling cadre deployment out for what it really is: the genesis of state capture. For the past two decades the DA has been a lone voice.
The second is that the party’s patronage system — the feeding trough that sustains its parasitic way of life and the reason cadre deployment has endured — is so entrenched that it cannot ever be budged, not even in the full glare of the spotlight. From ministers to councillors and everything in between, the ANC today exists first and foremost to extract wealth from the state. Service delivery is an afterthought.
And the third is that the party’s supposed Great Reformer has turned out to be the Great Pretender. If the best we could get out of the “good guy” in cabinet was that he kept quiet enough to keep his job, we didn’t get much at all. But this “long game” myth has given Ramaphosa perfect cover for all the things he never did to stop the rot. According to the myth, back when he was deputy president (and just happened to chair the ANC’s cadre deployment committee that inflicted so much criminal looting on our state) he didn’t do anything about it because then he would have found himself out in the cold and unable to continue his undercover operation.
And today, when asked why he still finds positions in his administration for individuals such as David Mahlobo and Arthur Fraser — people whose misdeeds have been extensively documented in reports — we are told he will not act against them until the Zondo commission’s report has been finalised and every last fact has been laid on the table. The long game works in mysterious ways indeed.
It is also important to note that you have to occasionally stick your fingers in your ears and pretend you didn’t also hear him contradict this long-game version of events by repeatedly saying he didn’t actually know at the time what was going on. Because the two stories aren’t really compatible. Like when he recommended the Guptas’ inside man and Saxonwold regular, Brian Molefe, for the top job at Eskom. “I had no clue,” he said of Molefe’s ties to the Gupta family. It’s not entirely clear just when he started to have a clue about Molefe, but apparently that’s when the long game took over.
But today Ramaphosa cannot claim he has no clue about Fraser, who serves as national commissioner of correctional services despite being heavily implicated in criminality and the running of a covert, parallel intelligence network, as described in the Mufamadi high-level review panel report. Just as he very much has a clue about Mahlobo, whose murky role in the State Security Agency is detailed in the same report, yet he is now found serving as deputy minister of water & sanitation. These are both Ramaphosa appointments, as are the likes of Bheki Cele, Ayanda Dlodlo and Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula. He knows enough about them to know they are wholly unsuitable for their positions. And yet he will not take action against them.
At the best of times you don’t want a president who can’t do anything. Someone so constricted by the warring factions in his party and so paralysed by his own doubts about who really holds the cards that he considers not rocking the boat to be his strongest course of action. No country would want that in a leader. But here, in our country with its huge challenges and frighteningly short timelines to solve them, we certainly cannot afford a president who hides his failures behind some kind of strategic inertia. If we really want to halt the slide and fix things here we need to start calling a spade a spade, just as we did with cadre deployment. There is no long game, there’s only quiet complicity.
Steenhuisen is DA leader.
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