GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Cyril Ramaphosa’s great age of mediocrity is upon us

South Africa, under the decidedly average eye of the ANC government, slipped quietly through a phase of decline a while ago, and deep into profound crisis. The cure, so many would have it, was the election of Cyril Ramaphosa. With him would come excellence and accountability, efficiency and outcomes.

Alas, it is not to be. What is coming is a great age of mediocrity. And the flag bearer appears to be Ramaphosa himself.

The primary form this will take is compromise. Compromise, in the best sense of the idea, is of course a critical political tool. Politics is the art of the possible, and the ability to compromise, without violating your bottom line, is how progress is often generated or assured.

But compromise without a bottom line is nothing more than appeasement. And if you are in the business of appeasement, bottom lines mean next to nothing. It is how principles and values die. The president’s Cabinet reshuffle makes the case.

Ramaphosa was always going to be constrained by the pool of talent available to him (the executive is drawn from the ANC national caucus, a dire collection of the weak and ordinary). Nevertheless, what he produced was a mediocrity: a collection of people that, with a few rare exceptions, is devoid of leadership or conviction.

Lindiwe Sisulu was appointed minister of international relations and co-operation, a premier portfolio, not because she has a great record in defence or human settlements (it is hard to say what she did there at all), but because he owed her a debt after she folded her campaign in favour of his and emerged from the ANC conference empty handed.

Bheki Cele too, fired as national police commissioner, was chosen as police minister to settle a political account. Blade Nzimande is back, because the SACP is back, so he gets transport. Quite what skill set he brings to that portfolio is anyone’s guess. He is the minister of transport because he is SACP secretary-general, not because he has a grand vision for our transport future.

Pravin Gordhan is on public enterprises, primarily because he is seen as incorruptible and SOEs are run like money-laundering rackets. But they are also in debt. Mad debt, and as finance minister he wasted no time borrowing money left, right and centre as he happily drove our deficit deep into the red to finance Zuma’s socialist economic black hole.

He is on public enterprises because the ANC will never rationalise or privatise SOEs; because, to fund a set of institutions that function on debt, you need someone who is totally on board borrowing.

Zweli Mkhize gets a job, Gwede Mantashe gets a job. Everyone gets a job. It’s like an episode of the Oprah Winfrey show. Only, these are second-hand cars.

One could go on. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is in the presidency because it is the presidency and your political rival must be accommodated with grace and prestige. But her portfolio — monitoring and evaluation — is a nothing business, that does nothing and achieves nothing. It never has. It is a farce.

And then there is the deputy president. All this talk of Ramaphosa the saviour has hurt him, actually. He needs to now demonstrate deference before the machine. So the ANC deputy president must be SA’s deputy president, not for the people but because the ANC’s national conference demanded it.

It was billed as a "consultative" Cabinet. That is just a euphemism. This was about appeasement, no question. And you know that because, go through the million column inches of printed speculation and hardly once, anywhere, from anyone, was there a discussion about who was actually best for the job. Excellence is simply not on the table. It was all politics. That’s how mediocrity works, it sucks you into its universe and soon enough you are debating on its terms.

Ramathusiasts will take some comfort from appointments such as Nhlanhla Nene to finance, but really he is just a highly competent technocrat, although one with a seemingly tougher line on the deficit. Free higher education will be a test on that front

Directors-general are no less important than ministers. One could quite credibly argue they are more important still. But they enjoy none of the celebrity and prestige that comes with being a member of the executive and so they are ignored almost wholesale. But you do that at your peril.

The directors-general are the engine room of service delivery. Jacob Zuma decimated them — more than 180 changes in nine years. The average amount of time a minister and director-general spent together under Zuma was just 14 months.

Ministers are half the problem. But they are the half that excites. And so they are the only half that matters. Mediocrity elevates the superficial at the expense of the substantial. In this way, it diverts attention away from its shortcomings.

We are now a nation having a discussion about how best to ensure the best mix of the inane, the compromised and the average. Because Ramaphosa simply purged many of the outright ethically corrupt, progress has ostensibly been made. Their placeholders are now people that represent political debts, not expertise.

We are confused as to whether we should celebrate or condemn. In the end we will just shrug our shoulders and justify it all as best we can. That’s the mediocre thing to do.

Ramathusiasts will take some comfort from appointments such as Nhlanhla Nene to finance, but really he is just a highly competent technocrat, although one with a seemingly tougher line on the deficit. Free higher education will be a test on that front.

But Ramaphosa’s mediocre universe extends far wider than just a Cabinet reshuffle. He set out the parameters in his state of the nation address. For every big issue he proposed a "consultative process". Soon he will have sucked all comers into his world of appeasement, the lowest common denominator becoming the benchmark for success.

A jobs summit, an investment conference, a youth working group, a digital industrial revolution commission, a presidential economic advisory council and a commission of inquiry into tax administration and governance of SARS: for every problem, Ramaphosa has a process. And for every process, he will seek to bind in all parties, so that they all become complicit and the process becomes the outcome.

Land expropriation is a difficult subject — guess what Ramaphosa has proposed? Yip. A "Codesa-like land summit". A summit for everyone.

All this will be a particular challenge to the opposition. How, for example, does it deal with a jobs summit? Does it attend and legitimise the process? Does it reject it? Does it attend and reject? It’s an important test, one Ramaphosa will repeatedly ask: are you a team player or an enemy, a builder or a breaker, as the New National Party used to say. All wrapped up in patriotism and national pride.

Processes, endless processes — they have neutered so much in SA. How we love them. The terms of reference, who will take part, when they will meet, how meetings will be conducted, what the deadlines will be, what the findings will say, what the findings can say and will the findings be accepted. It is how you lead through following, and we have been following the ANC’s lead or leading the ANC’s follow, for decades now.

There is so much more of that to come. It’s what Ramaphosa does best.

The effect of all of this is the principles and ideals are steadily denuded of their worth. One doesn’t aim for anything, for the process will determine the standard. Whatever emerges at the end of the day was the best anyone could have hoped for.

And so expectation and aspiration is reduced in turn. If this Cabinet can achieve Treasury’s growth target of about 2%, what a victory that will be. It’s less than 50% of what emerging markets average. We have then formally achieved mediocrity.

Ramaphosa’s policy programme, such as it is, is nothing more than the extension of a 24-year-old set of policies that have delivered little more than failure. But he has somehow managed to mask that behind a commitment to good and clean governance. That is good and necessary, but good governance and clean administration are not the benchmark for success. In healthy democracies they are taken as read. In SA, they seem to be all that matters.

But good governance to what end? To deliver what? Now there is a question. And it is the perfect environment for it all. Jacob Zuma reduced the bar so low that anything above outright failure will be deemed remarkable. And what better cause for celebration than incremental improvement from dire to acceptable? From broken to average? From damaged to stable?

It will take a good 5-10 years for this sort of mediocrity to become manifest, for people to realise that "progress" was always a relative promise, a means not of breaking a new dawn but merely of reconstituting normality. And South African normality is a dismal, depressing mean; one that hovers constantly around and about acceptable. No more and no less.

But at least we have a process to get us there. The process will at least distract us from our inability to imagine anything better than that which is just good enough.

• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the South African Institute of Race Relations