Why has nobody said it louder? The money stuffed into President Cyril Ramaphosa’s sofa was most likely intended for his war chest to defend his ANC presidency. I don’t know this. I have no inside track. But it is so far and away the most probable explanation that it warrants further attention.
The plausibility that the cash comes from the sale of animals, as Ramaphosa contends, diminishes by the day. From exotic animal breeders to auction house dealers to experts on illicit game trafficking, an untold number of people who know what they are talking about have said on the record that the story is not credible.
Nor is it likely that Ramaphosa was conducting private illicit business. He is resolutely a creature of the formal, licit economy. His place is in the boardrooms of Sandton and Rosebank, not the corners of out-of-the-way restaurants, his back never to the door. His vehicle of monetary transaction is the bank, not the sports bag filled with cash.
Ramaphosa’s presidential war chest is another question. When he ran against Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma for the ANC presidency the issue that preoccupied both of their campaigns was money. They both needed vast amounts of it.
Paying for the renewal of ANC memberships, staging rallies across the country at which food and T-shirts and all sorts of paraphernalia were given away, bringing regional leaders to Johannesburg for conference. These were just the bare essential, above board expenses both campaigns required, and it amounted to a small fortune.
From where to raise the money? This was the most awkward question both campaigns faced. No potential donor was uncontroversial. Every conceivable source of money came with deep embarrassment. The single most valuable leak the Dlamini Zuma camp prised from its rival was its list of donors. That the lion’s share turned out to be SA corporate businessmen and women inflicted deep wounds.
The radical economic transformation faction’s incessant charge against Ramaphosa — that he is a creature of white monopoly capital — was helped a great deal by the sources of funding the leak exposed.
And so, as the ANC’s 2022 elective conference loomed, the same problem arose once more. Where to get money? A lot of it. And how to get it in ways that were not extremely damaging? It seems that this time around the task was even harder. The word from Ramaphosa’s camp was that corporate SA was less willing to empty its pockets than before.
In 2017 Ramaphosa was regarded as the thin line between disaster and a semblance of normality. Since then his presidency has so disappointed corporate SA that the urgency with which it once reached for its chequebooks has dissipated. Increasingly, he is viewed by his erstwhile benefactors not as an agent of renewal but as the prolonger of the purgatory preceding the ANC’s inevitable fall.
Was Ramaphosa driven by this newfound meanness among his historical backers to look for money further afield? To a foreign government, perhaps? Or to a source even murkier and more troubling than that? And was the operation around him so shambolic that a portion of the funds arrived in cash at his farmhouse?
We may never discover the answers to these questions. Ramaphosa may well manage to obfuscate until the matter dies and go on to be re-elected ANC president. His reputation sullied, his project thrown off course, he may well live to lead his party to historic defeat.
The story I have told here is speculative. The truth is so often more outlandish than anything we can imagine. But as a hypothesis it is more than credible. If it is true, the irony is sharp. In giving up on him Ramaphosa’s corporate backers may have launched a self-fulfilling prophecy, turning him into an even greater disappointment than they feared.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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