President Cyril Ramaphosa sometimes reminds me of my dad. We lived in what was then Umtata, in the days when salesmen came to your door with the Encyclopedia Britannica, a newfangled vacuum cleaner or shares in a Free State gold prospect.
When they knocked my dad always opened the gate. He loved to chat and would closely question visitors about their lives. Their reward was almost always a sale. My mother would despair. “Harold,” she would say as he came back inside the house, “you’re a bloody fool.”
What she meant was that he was a terrible judge of character. He trusted everybody. Ramaphosa is also a poor assessor of character, judging by the number of people in his cabinet who are measurably incompetent to do the jobs they hold and almost completely incapable of completing whatever task it may be they are working on. The minister battling gamely now for 0 out of 10 as media outlets compile their annual scorecards has to be the newish minister in the presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni.
In the space of a not even completed presidential term, Ramaphosa has promoted her from relative obscurity to become, first, minister of small business development, where she achieved nothing; then posts & communication, where she helped speed up the destruction of the Post Office; and earlier this year to minister in the presidency, nominally with oversight over the intelligence agencies, which also sit in the Union Buildings; and, in effect to government’s spokesperson.
In her latter role her television appearances and briefings have become news events in themselves as she struggles to hold on to the decorum of leadership and the unrelenting demands of simple logic.
Pitching up at the scene of a fire that killed more than 70 people in Johannesburg in September, her first utterance was that government wasn’t to blame. It wasn’t that there was a housing problem. “No it’s not, because the majority of those people who stay and reside in hijacked buildings are not South African and they are not in this country legally and the government cannot provide housing to illegal immigrants,” she said, in a ringing declaration of solidarity with poor and desperate Africans, and without having a clue how many of the dead were in fact illegal immigrants.
She was named in the Zondo state capture commission report. As a director of Denel, it said, she had participated in the decision to fire three executives standing in the way of the Gupta brothers’ effort to take control of the company back in 2015. She denied ever having met the Guptas, which wasn’t quite the point.
Earlier this year, when journalists invited to trail Ramaphosa’s colourful effort to negotiate a peace between Russia and Ukraine were left stranded in Warsaw, Poland, and then had the temerity to complain, Ramaphosa’s spokesperson suggested that if they were so unhappy perhaps they shouldn’t go along the next time he travelled.
Last year, after former Post Office CEO Mark Barnes offered to buy the Post Office and return it to profitability, she implied that having failed to fix it the first time around he now wanted to buy it on the cheap. “Mr Mark Barnes was given R3.5bn to turn around [the SA Post Office] and did not turn [it] around,” she said in parliament. “It is very rich coming from him that he says he will turn the entity around.” Instead she promised a dazzling new strategy was being put in place to turn things around. It has never materialised.
Between Barnes’ departure in 2019 and September this year the Post Office’s assets had fallen R17.9bn in value and, by the way, readers who used to use the branch at Post Office Centre in Illovo, Johannesburg, beware. It closed last week after the landlord tired of waiting for his rent. More than 300 branches have closed since 2021.
This week Ntshavheni reached arguably the height of absurdity when, in the wake of Standard Chartered Bank admitting liability to Competition Commission charges of currency manipulation, she said she wasn’t surprised as it merely proved the private sector — business in other words — was dedicated to undermining and collapsing the SA state. Remember, this is government now speaking. Officially.
There’s probably a criminal libel case to bring there, if anyone in business in this country has the balls. Treachery is, I think, a crime. And there was no stopping Ramaphosa’s favourite child. “We have maintained over the period that the performance of the rand and sometimes the performance of the economy has been manipulated by private sector, which has no interest in the development of this country‚ which continues to engineer and do machination to make sure the government collapses‚” Ntshavheni said. “That’s why they also feed in the narrative that there is a collapsing state‚ there is a collapsing economy because that’s what they wish [for] and their actions do that.”
Yep, it’s business that’s driven unemployment to the highest in the world, business that’s responsible for port congestion, Eskom’s collapse, high crime, falling property values and broken, filthy cities all around the country. Off with their heads.
The currency manipulation by malicious traders took place nearly a decade ago in other bigger economies, long before Ramaphosa came into office. They have already dealt with it. And Standard Chartered has almost no presence in SA. But Ntshavheni’s remarks betray a determination to demonise business. The Competition Commission, now emboldened, will proceed to do to the banking industry what it did to construction for collusion after the 2010 soccer World Cup.
As a result of that we no longer have a construction industry worth talking about and now the banks are in for a world of pain. At least half of Ramaphosa’s cabinet will think it’s about time too. Like my mom said about my dad, when it comes to picking people Ramaphosa really is a bloody fool. How does he let an infantile mind like Ntshavheni’s speak for him? Can he do no better?
If you’ve ever had to do or watch Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance as a school play, I’ve rewritten one of the songs for baby Khumbudzo ...
I am the very model of a modern cab’net minister
I like to think of bus-i-ness as something jolly sinister
I have no proof to back me up, It matters not inside my club
They’re not really that quizzical, it’s all become quite mystical
My mouth is quite out of control, Don’t stop me when I’m on a roll
I have a view beyond the facts, so mock and jeer but don’t relax
My targets are ephemeral, my jobs destroyed are several
I am the very model of a modern cab’net minister
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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