Here is a sentence from an April 2019 letter to the editor, just ahead of the national elections and which perfectly captures the spirit of “Ramaphoria” at the time: “I submit that a vote for Ramaphosa is not a vote for the old ANC that we know. It is the new dawn ANC of President Ramaphosa.”
The patriotic zeal fairly radiated off the page.
Just after the election, the author wrote to the editor again, and again their cup did runneth over: “Cyril Ramaphosa has just saved the ANC and SA. His detractors will scoff at his conclusion more so because they are seated uncomfortably in the rogue’s gallery that is rapidly filling up. These are the men and women who are guilty of corruption in its ugliest and most dangerous form. They recklessly led SA to the brink of economic collapse while they fed from the trough.”
“The urgent appointment of several commissions, the chief of which is led by deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo is welcomed. President Ramaphosa cracked the whip. He now has the baton firmly in his grasp. The voters have given him the mandate. He also has the backing of his supporters.”
From that point, however, no more letters on the subject — at least none that could be found on the public record — flowed from that particularly enthusiastic citizen’s pen.
That makes sense. In 2019, the spirit of Ramaphosa was Casper: a healthy, happy and entirely friendly ghost, that shone brightly in the darkness. Today, however, it is more the Spectre of Death: a gaunt and harrowing apparition, indistinguishable from the thousand other lifeless ANC vapours that surround it.
We live in a country of failure. And, on the ANC’s watch, there have been some monumental implosions, disappointments and catastrophes, all built up beforehand as potential strategic masterstrokes. But few things will match Ramaphoria for sheer, unadulterated fantasy.
The thought that Cyril Ramaphosa would save the ANC from itself was akin to thinking a cup of chlorine poured into the ocean, would make transparent all the worldly waters.
And besides, it wasn’t even chlorine, just relatively clear seawater. Relative to mud.
It has been painful, even as a nonbeliever, to watch the saviour die what has been a horrible, excruciating and very public death. Each week, a tiny bit of flesh ripped away, mostly by Ramaphosa himself.
You feel the decision to bail out SAA, again, to the tune of about R16bn capped it all off. It is unanswerable, after all. Here you have the great reformer, the mighty bringer of economic restructuring and ideological renewal, capitulating before the God of policy failure like all those who came before him.
Ramaphosa’s trumpeting angels, who heralded his coming — the likes of Mboweni and Mthembu — with songs of great promise, are now experienced as well-intentioned but weak and powerless. At their most influential, they can tweet something rational. But that’s as good as it gets. Ramaphoria was not so much a line in the sand as a castle, and the tide has almost all of it now.
True believers might argue that Covid-19 is responsible for much of this. It wasn’t. The truth is, the Covid-19 crisis revealed Ramaphosa for what he is: a nebbish — like the ANC’s very own Mmusi Maimane — big on clichés and platitudes and calls to patriotism and goodwill, but without substance. Without those real qualities you need to be a leader: conviction and purpose.
If he was ever different from the ANC — and really, you need to torture the historical record to arrive at that conclusion — he isn’t anymore. The “old ANC”, to quote our enthusiastic Ramaphoriac, was “the new dawn”. Covid-19 is what has made it all apparent. Rather than Ramaphosa leading the ANC, the ANC leads him, which is the only way the ANC has ever had it. And it led him, inevitably, to failure. Just as it led Mbeki to load-shedding and Zuma to corruption before him.
There was the lockdown farce. Ostensibly presented as great foresight and preparedness but, by the president’s own recent admission, clearly resulted in no real preparedness at all. Now the bare bones of a shambolic healthcare system are being unrelentingly exposed. Then there were the rules and regulations — antiquated and draconian rubbish that made about as much sense as they were effective, which is to say none at all. They stand alone in terms of global precedent.
Finally, the president’s own lack of leadership. Where, in other countries, presidents would face the public and media every day, Ramaphosa would hide away in the dark, emerging every month or so to read a hollow script that said exactly nothing about anything.
The consequences of all this is economic devastation without parallel in SA’s recent history. So Ramaphosa is in the process of overseeing a grand failure. As the failure unfolds, so his reputation unravels.
In the background, every single problem he inherited remains more or less in the exact same state as when they were first handed over to him. Can anyone name one serious reform? Just one. Something that will change the game in a particular area?
You cannot, because they do not exist. All that is exists are words. They were enough to feed the congregation originally. But even the church of Ramaphosa is getting seriously hungry for something more now.
As ever, the problem with SA remains a brutally simple one: the ANC. To survive, it needs to be voted out of power. If you are in the silver bullet business, that’s about the best you are going to do, economically, ethically and in terms of governance outcomes. You can deny that and spend your time looking for saviours. Or you can embrace that and spend your time promoting alternatives. But stay inside the ANC’s universe and oblivion is the only end point to your journey.
Speaking about those who had “captured the state”, in the final sentence of his April 2019 letter, our Ramaphoriac said the following of Ramaphosa: “His trump card has the names of all those in dark robes riding high. Their state capture mission must fail, as all of them will be sacked after the election on May 8.”
Turns out, many of them got cabinet positions. And, in perhaps the ultimate irony, his defeated opponent, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, would become the lynchpin interface between the public and the state, as the Covid-19 crisis unfolded.
Of course, the ANC was always at pains to say the minister represents the views of the collective, as does the president. But we don’t really ever listen to the ANC. Which is why we are slow to learn. The SA president is, in reality, the ANC’s national spokesperson. Always has been, always will be. No more, no less.
And, until people grasp that, all roads will lead to perpetual failure, and the accompanying disappointment when imagined saviours turn out to be no more than party bureaucrats.
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