There’s an eerie stillness. As expected, there’s no uprising from supporters of ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, as confidently promised by the City Press this past Sunday. There are no vaccines yet, but health minister Zweli Mkhize is already revising his plans to roll them out. The IMF says the world economy may grow at 6% this year, a breathtaking pace. It also says we will do half of that. We’d be lucky.
I was talking to a friend the other day with whom I often discuss our politics and what we can do to fix our country. He is always full of clever ideas and calculations. But suddenly we had run out of fixes. It isn’t that there aren’t better ways to run SA — heaven knows there are a multitude. It’s just that, for the moment, there seems so little point trying.
No-one is listening. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration has, in its own mind, consulted with business, labour and civil society and has left the runway. That’s done. The partnering is done. There’s no more talk. No place for another idea. It’s full steam ahead. Everything is done.
Up in the clouds, master plans are produced, industries protected, while little people downstream shut up shop and let workers go. Over at communications, Stella gets her way and Postbank is cleaved away from the Post Office to be the new “state bank” from which cheap money will flow like champagne at an ANC birthday celebration. Everything is fine.
SAA is about to fly again. Yes! Just a few billion more for operating capital and we’re away. Emergency power is being literally shipped to our aid by a Turkish company with a contract in its pocket to park generating ships in three of our ports for 20 years. Twenty.
To save a coal-mining transaction between two companies it has no interest in, Eskom, broke, is asking the Treasury for permission to pay the acquiring miner hundreds of millions of rand more for an increased coal price from one mine. If it can’t, the mine closes and the whole deal might collapse. No-one even asks the buyer why he’s buying a loss-making mine. The ports are clogged and the railways are a disaster.
Over at communications, Stella gets her way and Postbank is cleaved away from the Post Office to be the new ‘state bank’ from which cheap money will flow like champagne at an ANC birthday celebration
The only interesting point about all of this, which we all know, is that as the government makes the poor policy choices it does, and fumbles the few working assets it still has, Ramaphosa becomes more, rather than less, settled in office and assured of a second term.
It doesn’t always show, but it’s there. Magashule, our favourite bogeyman, will indeed step down from his job before he goes on trial in August, with 15 others, on 74 charges of fraud, theft, corruption and money laundering. And the ANC, decrepit as it may be, still won’t fall apart. Former president Jacob Zuma is more than likely to be arrested and jailed for contempt for refusing to appear before the commission of inquiry into state capture.
The threats and the whining and the blame and the hysteria you hear around you is loud but contained. There will be some protests when Zuma is finally arrested. People may even get hurt. But they will not threaten Ramaphosa or the wider community.
Even on Covid, the president has had a relatively easy ride, the fruits of responding early. The politics of his cabinet dictate that he has had to allow his ministers to behave poorly towards the public, just as they make poor policy in their day jobs. No-one is a Ramaphosa minister for his or her expertise.
That he is late on vaccines will also be forgiven as more arrive and (especially) if the much-threatened third wave holds off longer than it already has. As has been the case with many SA leaders in our history, Ramaphosa is lucky we are a conservative nation. Loud and fractious maybe, but slow to rebel.
What ought to worry us is that the president begins to confuse his political safety with our economic fortunes. If he becomes comfortable with the economic sludge we live in, it could go on forever. “What people believe will always be more important than the truth,” says a character in a brilliant new novel, You Never Really Know, by John Hunt, an authentic Joburger who knows his country’s heart.
Pay attention and don’t be distracted. Slowly, Ramaphosa is tightening his grip on the party, in parliament, in Luthuli House and in his cabinet. It may, in the end, never be a sure thing but it’s surer now than it was when he started out. Ask the public protector.
If he has a rival for ANC leadership come the next party leadership election in December next year, my money would be on Zweli Mkhize, a man of soaring ambition and still smarting from not having won entry into the party’s “Top Six” in December 2017. Sadly for him though, close associates appear to have made real money out of health department Covid spending. Damage has been done and it could get worse.
That, some might argue, would be reward for the strange times the rest of us have to live in while a vaccinated elite run the government, or what passes for one.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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