This week, as President Cyril Ramaphosa finalised steps to deal with his governance albatross — an overwhelmingly weak cabinet — another political albatross that seems set to dominate his presidency reared its ugly head. The SA Revenue Service (Sars) announced that the president’s farm, Ntaba Nyoni, scene of the bizarre theft of foreign currency in 2020, was actually tax compliant.
The genesis of this unusual step by Sars is the bizarre suggestion that around Christmas Day in 2019 a foreign businessman landed in SA to celebrate his wife’s birthday and just happened to have with him a large amount of foreign currency. As luck would have it, the businessman conducted a walkabout and somehow landed at the president’s other farm, Phala Phala, and bought some animals, which he has since neglected to collect.
The subsequent theft of the money, and former intelligence operative Arthur Fraser becoming aware of the story, triggered a political crisis that left Ramaphosa a heartbeat away from resigning as president in 2022.
Given the fanciful nature of this tale, Sars, the Reserve Bank and the public protector were asked to probe the compliance of the president’s business activities with SA’s laws and regulations. The declaration of the foreign currency on arrival — which the businessman claims to have completed — fell within the ambit of Sars, which announced that it can find no trace of any such thing. That naturally invited more questions about the compliance of the farm’s operations, and led to Sars receiving the blessing from the president’s people to inform the public that it is indeed compliant.
The processes that have been undertaken by different role players to understand the Phala Phala saga have been characterised by various approaches that simply trigger more questions. The parliamentary process — where the question was whether the president had committed acts that fall within the ambit of a Section 89 impeachment process — was a political process in which the eventual conclusion by the panel that the president had a case to answer was roundly killed off by a show of hands. Given the political design of the process, the president’s position is secure for as long as the ANC retains its majority in parliament.
The public protector’s process has been criticised for being too slow, which invites questions such as whether it is biding its time in the hope that new circumstances will emerge that diminish its prominent role in the investigation. Proponents of the theory that the acting public protector could somehow have accelerated the process cite the fact that later in 2023 there will be a vacancy at the top, and she may well put her hand up. To such sceptics her apparent reluctance to rule with haste is indicative of a long game with an eye on the politics that will come into play later in the year.
The problem such sceptics do not engage with is whether an institution that is supposed to act impartially and without fear or favour should be expected to accelerate any investigation on the basis of the affected parties, rather than the institution’s programme of action. This unresolved tension may invite excitement when the scent of scandal involving the president drives the hysteria, but also sets flawed precedents when the prioritisation of cases follows politics rather than principles.
For the Reserve Bank the criticism is more cogent, as it is difficult to imagine how the relatively simple test of whether declarations were made on time or not is taking so long to complete.
The sum of these developments has come at a remarkably awkward time for the country, which has been greylisted by the Financial Action Task Force as a result of the weak controls around the flow of currency within our borders.
The fact that the president’s own story has become the primary reference point for the issues raised makes this albatross a persistently heavy one around Ramaphosa’s neck.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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