President Cyril Ramaphosa might find his a thankless task. Perceived and actual failures attract intense criticism while there is a reluctance to give him any credit.
Take his gruelling testimony at the Zondo commission last week, which followed a previous appearance that can hardly be said to have been a walk in the park. Given the assault on the constitution by his predecessor, and the physical attack on the country by his would-be supporters, seeing the president forced to confront his party’s failures was a powerful affirmation of the democratic order.
The counter view is that perhaps praising him for that is giving too much credit for something that should be standard. The point, though, is that it’s not one that’s generally adhered to across the world, and in a context in which the principles of democracy and accountable governance are under constant attack, Ramaphosa does stick out as setting a good example.
Earlier in 2021, Lionel Barber, the former editor of the Financial Times, wrote in this newspaper about his interview with Vladimir Putin, in which the Russian leader declared that “the liberal idea has become obsolete” because, in his view, it had “come into conflict with the majority of the population”.
The idea of a trade-off between democracy on the one hand and a state that provides a “stable, normal, safe and predictable life” is not a new one. Observers such as the billionaire George Soros have commented on an apparent national consensus in China, where the population is willing to live with a lack of democratic freedoms in return for a constant improvement in living standards.
As far as the concept of state capture goes, SA might have a lot to learn from the type of capitalism that emerged in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But we won’t be hearing about it from any commission, and Putin will not subject himself to questioning by a judge any time soon, and definitely not in front of television cameras, to be forever immortalised on YouTube.
That’s not to say Ramaphosa’s performance was impressive. His defence against the charge that as deputy president during the second term of Jacob Zuma’s presidency he was complicit in what happened is not entirely convincing, depending on an assertion that cannot be tested.
It’s not different from Bheki Cele’s attempt to deflect from the police service’s failures. As the police minister and the now former minister of state security Ayanda Dlodlo assert that they prevented the looting and riots that rocked the country in July from being much worse, the president would like us to believe he fought a good fight behind the scenes.
“There were a whole lot of battles I got involved in quietly and silently; there are a number of them,” he told the commission. It’s an argument the president’s supporters accept uncritically, arguing that the country would have been in a much worse state now had he not played the “long game” he’s renowned for.
The problem is that it requires us to simply take his word for it, though it would also be unfair to dismiss it out of hand. Immediately after taking over, he moved to undo some of the damage to institutions such as the National Prosecuting Authority and the SA Revenue Service, which are now on the road to recovery.
It is now an established fact that, horrified by the appointment of Des van Rooyen as finance minister in one of Zuma’s notorious cabinet reshuffles, it was Ramaphosa the business community turned to as the markets tanked, pushing the rand to a record low.
That appointment was reversed, paving the way for the return of Pravin Gordhan as finance minister. I remember following this particular story from afar, writing on Bloomberg about how it showed the power of so-called bond vigilantes who had forced Zuma’s hand. The term had technical origins, referring to investors offloading bonds to protest against monetary or fiscal policies considered inflationary.
In theory, the rising yields, which indicate higher borrowing costs for the government, should spook policymakers into doing the right thing. That has since extended to more explicitly political decisions such as the occasional firing of central bank governors who don’t do the bidding of presidents, most recently seen in Turkey and Zambia.
Perhaps the fickle bond investors were not as influential as I assumed. Ramaphosa also said he had stood up to Zuma when, in 2017, he fired Gordhan and his then deputy, Mcebisi Jonas. By then Zuma’s power and hold over the ANC was waning, and less than a year later Ramaphosa would replace him.
Of course, his testimony also entailed defending the indefensible, not least the ANC’s deployment committee that sends cadres to state institutions such as state-owned enterprises (SOEs), with loyalty to the party being apparently the most important qualifying criteria.
The consequences are blindly obvious and have been seen in the collapse of municipalities across the country and SOEs that had pushed the country’s finances to the brink, even before the Covid-19 outbreak. No-one can believe it was merely an advisory body with no power to enforce the will of the party.
Governments across the world rarely entrust institutions to those they don’t trust themselves. It might be a uniquely SA naiveté to give it a name. Ramaphosa couldn’t exactly say that, so instead he tied himself in knots.
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