A few weeks before the national elections, President Cyril Ramaphosa bestowed national honours on one of the country’s most celebrated minds — William Smith. As the country’s unofficial national maths and science teacher, Smith helped generations of students navigate their way through problems and theorems. But even his skills would struggle to solve the conundrum Ramaphosa faces now.
As the nation’s chief administrator, Ramaphosa’s job involves identifying and appointing individuals with the requisite skills to help him fulfil the mandate of running the state. Ideally, such a process would be wholly within his control, but as fate would have it, his role is heavily influenced by elements that are both peripheral and ephemeral. While the president would prefer autonomy on the question of the size and composition of his executive, the fact that he derives his political legitimacy from a party means such autonomy doesn’t exist.
The ANC’s national working committee (NWC), though not a state structure but a party one, retains significant sway over the issue of who gets to serve in the country’s executive. Comprising an alliance of interests and stakeholders whose primary focus is what serves their comrades best, rather than what the country needs, the NWC is a difficult structure to satisfy.
Ramaphosa’s campaign message centred on restoring the state’s political, economic and justice institutions, whose decline has been facilitated by the deployment policy the NWC oversees. The deployment of incompetent and compromised cadres to such institutions was not merely an error of judgment, it was a well-co-ordinated process.
While the make-up of the NWC may have changed since 2017, it is inconceivable that the primary instincts of its members — deploying those aligned to the party rather than those whose competence is aligned to the task — will change overnight. Ramaphosa’s best bet is to identify the portfolios that are key to his reform mandate within the economic and justice clusters, and push hard for his preferred candidates. In instances where party politics and alliance allegiances impose candidates on him, he will have to compromise by allocating them to portfolios that are not core to his reform mandate.
This means we are likely to end up with a cabinet of two drawers: the top one made up of those who are competent and have managed to evade the pervasive tentacles of state capture, incompetence and adverse court judgments; and the lower one bearing those he must carry because the prevailing politics forces him to. There are also the ephemeral issues that must be tackled, the cloud surrounding Pravin Gordhan being a case in point.
It is well known that the EFF has a hostile relationship with Gordhan. It is equally well known that within the current cohort of potential cabinet ministers, few can match him in terms of competence and experience. The SA Revenue Service saga — either his greatest lapse in judgment or his most annoying political headache — is going to haunt him for the better part of the next year.
His review application against the public protector’s report is going to get caught in the quagmire of our lethargic justice system for months on end. Appointing him to the cabinet will lead to the usual cacophony from the red overalls on the opposition benches about how Gordhan is elevated above his peers. Yet leaving him out would see the president yielding to the prevailing noise and sacrificing the national interest, which would be best served with Gordhan continuing to fix the state enterprises.
Ramaphosa has tried to stay true to his promises, but if he has to start making unpopular decisions that p**s off a few people, appointing Gordhan to his new cabinet will be a forgivable place to start. With any luck the EFF’s noise will be very ephemeral.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is a chartered accountant, academic and activist.
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