President Cyril Ramaphosa appears likely to survive Phala Phala. He is safe from the public protector, from the SA Revenue Service and most likely from the Reserve Bank. As for the Hawks investigation, it may go on forever.
The scandal has weakened him immeasurably, but he has decided that being a weakened president is better than being a former president. Wounded, he goes on.
How does the saga reflect on him now, nearly a year after it emerged? It’s impossible to answer the question confidently when we still don’t know what the money was for. But the overwhelming probability is that it was meant for a war chest to defend his ANC presidency.
If that is indeed the case, what the scandal does not reflect on is Ramaphosa’s moral character. When he threw his hat in the ring to lead the ANC, Ramaphosa was not free to invent the terrain on which he fought. Both in 2017, and again in 2022, ANC presidential contenders had to raise a lot of money. The source of that money was always questionable, so it had to be concealed.
Why this dreadful situation arose is a subject for another column. It is what Ramaphosa inherited. He could have either left the presidency to others, or dabble in the dark arts. That was the choice he faced, and I for one don’t condemn him for that.
It is what happened next that reflects most interestingly on Ramaphosa. In both his presidential fundraising campaigns, in 2017 and again in 2022, he failed miserably in the dark arts and was caught out almost immediately by his foes.
In the 2017 campaign his opponents got their hands on a full list of his donors: their names, how much they had given, everything. They had obviously planted, or bought, someone on the inside.
Ditto in 2022. Arthur Fraser had a front-row seat to the amateurish attempts to conceal the theft at Phala Phala. Somebody at the heart of the cover-up appears to have shared the whole story with him, either as it was happening or not long after.
There are many lessons to draw from this tale. One is that Ramaphosa is terrible at the dark arts. They really are not his thing. In a country where subterfuge and concealment are such established vocations, the president is not among its most talented practitioners. Perhaps that is to his credit.
There is another aspect to the tale. Ramaphosa is, famously, a cautious president. And he is cautious because he is mistrustful. He will not set sail until he has gathered everyone on board, for he fears those left behind will torpedo the ship.
His two presidential campaigns must have confirmed his deepest fears. He had behind him hand-picked teams of devoted lieutenants. This was the most benign, the most controllable institutional environment. Yet even here, where he ought to have felt at ease, it turned out that his foes were nestled close by.
If that is what happened in his presidential campaign, just imagine his fear of the institutions of state. Each of them must feel very dangerous to him, full of spoilers, enemies and saboteurs.
Ramaphosa’s official and informal spokespeople say he is less uncomfortable now. He has a new ANC national executive stacked with supporters. His main foe, the radical economic transformation faction of the ANC, was defeated at the elective conference in December. The Gauteng ANC’s incipient alliance with the EFF is looking less scalable to a national level than it did before Monday’s tepid day of action.
But the story of Phala Phala suggests Ramaphosa will always feel uncomfortable, for what he learnt there is that his most anxious imaginings are true; that nowhere in the world is there a space safe enough for him to act with freedom; and that somebody with ill intent is always right there beside him.
In its very strangeness the Phala Phala story is an emblem of his sense of uncertainty, an externalisation of his inner fears, and a caution that if he acts he risks getting hurt.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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