President Cyril Ramaphosa was a brave man to sit through another two days of questioning at the Zondo commission on state capture. He seemed to believe, though, that he could smile, shrug and absolve himself with promises that such heinous things would never happen again.
But it was not that easy. Acting chief justice Raymond Zondo and the evidence leaders, with their eyes now fixed on the recommendations of the final report, had ground they needed to cover with him.
The first issue was whether he was complicit in state capture. Ramaphosa’s first line of defence, which was to say he didn’t know, fell apart by the second day, when advocate Vas Soni turned the screws on him over the corruption at the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa).
Prasa chair Popo Molefe’s appeal to him and the ANC top six had been ignored, said Soni, a sin perhaps not of commission but certainly of omission. Under pressure next from Zondo, Ramaphosa was unable to explain how he could not have known that something sinister was afoot at Eskom when he himself was head of the Eskom war room.
On day two Ramaphosa backtracked and a more honest picture emerged: if anyone had the impression that he had said he did not know, well that was the wrong impression. And while he continued to assert that his silence was not complicity with Jacob Zuma’s abuses, what was established beyond doubt by the commission was that state capture happened and the ANC did nothing to stop it.
Was Ramaphosa’s silence during his four years as the number two in the Zuma administration the right thing to do? This is more difficult to answer. Zondo dealt with it by pointing out that while Ramaphosa believed he had to remain “strategically” silent to avoid being removed — the merits of which were difficult to judge — the fact of the matter was that the Guptas walked out of SA with R59bn in taxpayers’ money.
And the plundered R59bn is the least of the damage done by the nine wasted years. SA’s stagnant economy, which has caused GDP per capita to fall, unemployment to rise and is a turn-off for investors, is a cost beyond counting. SA’s political risk profile has been heightened and its credit ratings have plunged. The cost of government borrowing is sky high, and SA is staring at a resource-constrained and debt-distressed future. Corruption became rampant in every part of state. It was an extremely expensive nine years. It is not certain that SA will fully recover.
The collapse of the ANC’s tradition of collective leadership was breathtaking as they all stood back and allowed the strong man to dismember the state and loot and steal with impunity. The alternative to silence would have been to build internal ANC resistance against Zuma. A more active and concerted campaign by ethical leaders within the ANC to check Zuma’s abuse of power would have lessened the damage and the size of the plunder.
But internal resistance could also have led to the ejection of Ramaphosa and others and split the ANC. How this would have unfolded is unknown. While the upside could have been a political realignment with a moderate centre forming around Ramaphosa and the DA, and militant African nationalism coalescing around the ANC and the EFF, the downside could have been a chaotic and destabilising power struggle in the ANC that spilt over into broader society.
As Zondo said, it is difficult to determine the merits of the silent strategy. A finding on Ramaphosa’s honesty is hard to make. What is more useful now is to look to the future. Unfortunately, the evidence that the ANC at large, and Ramaphosa himself, have acquired the experience and will to prevent state capture happening again is not clear. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Ramaphosa’s determination to hold on to his party’s deployment strategy.
That this has been the single biggest blight on the ANC’s ability to govern is blindingly obvious. As a distressed senior public servant wrote in Monday’s Business Day after watching Ramaphosa’s testimony, the benign picture of deployment is not accurate (“Practical questions about cadre deployment”, August 15).
When a provincial deployment committee decides who should be appointed as head of the engineering department of a district municipality responsible for water and sanitation services, “is it because the committee is better equipped to choose the most suitable candidate, considering the relative merits of the engineering qualifications and experience of running water and waste water treatment plants ... Or is it because the deployment committee wants to choose a candidate who will comply with requests to steer procurement processes to benefit the ANC or individual ANC members, or both?”
Ramaphosa, who is so good at sliding away from culpability, must search himself to give an honest answer to that question.
• Paton is editor at large.
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