President Cyril Ramaphosa has come under mounting pressure to fire justice minister Thembi Simelane, or at least to indicate whether he might be considering it, or at least to acknowledge that he’s heard of VBS Mutual Bank, or else to twitch an eyelid. But let us not underestimate how hard his decision is.
Of course, I understand the impatience of those who feel Ramaphosa is stalling. After all, in the world in which you and I live this all seems very straightforward. In our world, if people in a position of authority are linked to possible corruption, they are suspended or moved sideways while they are investigated. Or, if they went to a private boys’ school, they are promoted to senior vice-president of sales. Either way, they leave.
But Ramaphosa doesn’t live in our world, and not only because he’s tried it and found the condor egg omelettes hideously overcooked.
No, in his world expediency and pragmatism trump petit bourgeois concerns about right and wrong and who did what with which pensioners’ life savings. Which is why when he wants to hire someone, their ability, integrity and even their past and future crimes don’t really matter. All that matters is their loyalty and ambition, and how easily the former can be guaranteed by stoking the latter.
As for firing them, well the only relevant question is the one famously asked in Succession by the uberpragmatist Gerri Kellman: how does this serve my interests?
Cache of favours
These simple criteria don’t imply a simple process though. On the contrary: when Ramaphosa so much as touches the idea of censuring Simelane he touches a strand in a vast web, setting dozens, scores, hundreds of other threads twitching, each one attached to a faction, a network, a cache of favours still to be called, an opponent alerted to a potential weakness to exploit.
And this is to say nothing of the ANC’s historical obsession, for better and for worse, with consensus. Imagine trying to get anything done in an organisation in which leadership is measured by how few comrades you startle awake.
I’m exaggerating for comic effect, of course: leadership in the ANC is often measured by the volume at which you tell rented crowds that you are a good leader. Still, one’s ability not to rock any boats does seem important.
Speaking of boats that don’t rock, perhaps because they’re on bricks, I noticed that urge to find consensus — are least to spread the blame — on comical display at the weekend as the SA Navy invited the public to clamber aboard some of its ships at the Simon’s Town naval base.
The festival seems to have been a happy one for the many families that turned up, even if it did produce one of the more depressing bits of reportage I’ve seen lately, with one of the country’s largest news organisations describing the new Prasa trains that shuttled people to Simon’s Town as “swanky”.
Take note, B-grade politicians: if you do badly enough for long enough, and then finally introduce a clean, efficient but otherwise entirely ordinary train service, at least one journalist will report that you have given the people pure luxury.
Musty breath
Certainly, everyone seemed far more excited about the trains than the presence of the Neustrashimy, a Russian frigate working hard to achieve the Russian navy’s greatest and most challenging strategic goals: not to be on fire or at the bottom of the Black Sea.
But, much like the Neustrashimy, I digress. The point is that the weekend worked well as a public relations exercise. And yet as I read the dutiful reports and looked at photos of excited visitors and marching bands, the musty breath of the knackered ANC wafted off the screen courtesy of one particular tweet by the ministry of defence.
I don’t remember the specifics — imagine some official pictures next to soulless verbiage about service and the public — but what I do remember was the hashtag it included: #LetsDoMoreTogether.
This, of course, is one of the ANC’s recent election slogans and one that has often made me wonder: let’s do more what together? Losing? Cheap cocaine? Nothing?
However, in this context it made perfect sense, because the navy is in crisis and what better way to tackle a crisis than to invoke a vague collectivist response, without a clear leader or a plan of action?
To be fair, defence minister Angie Motshekga does seem to have a plan, developed over the last few years of watching her ANC colleagues blame Eskom for the ANC government’s inability to do what the ANC government subsequently did.
At the weekend Motshekga explained that the navy — which the ANC has only been in charge of for an extremely brief 30 years — is struggling because of dysfunction at the Armscor dockyard, which, I was disappointed to learn, is a large repair shop and not, as I assumed, Simon’s Town’s only punk bar.
Of course, if the public was inconvenienced by the navy’s slow collapse we’d soon see the next phase of that plan — reports that ships were being sabotaged by penguins who are being radicalised by octopuses — but that’s for another day and another scandal.
For now though, Motshekga and her slowly sinking ship are a useful reminder to all of us of what Ramaphosa has to work with. No wonder he’s going slowly.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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