TOM EATON: Another mauve DA line crossed as bad things await after Ramaphosa

I’m all for accountability, but you have to admit that threatening Cyril Ramaphosa with a vote of no confidence feels a bit mean, coming just a year after we held a national vote of no confidence in which 60% of the electorate queued for hours to tell him they don’t trust him to run a bath.

Of course, Ramaphosa has a thick skin, and not only because he sometimes has to rough it on 150-count linen when he’s on the campaign trail. He’s been around the block a few times, mostly as his limo driver tries to find a parking spot, and he knows how unlikely any of this is to happen, mostly because nobody except Jacob Zuma wants it to happen, and certainly not the DA, whose idea it was in the first place.

That, after all, is why John Steenhuisen could hold it over the ANC like a kind of nuclear bomb, telling Ramaphosa that if he didn’t make amends for firing Andrew Whitfield by sacking the likes of Thembi Simelane and David Mahlobo, Steenhuisen and his party would unleash “grave consequences” on the nation by launching a process that might, at least in theory, see Ramaphosa recalled and SA plunged into chaos.

Indeed, the very gravity of that threat has seen the DA start some pre-emptive damage control, as both Steenhuisen and Helen Zille have told the press that if the DA decides to collapse the country it’s not the party’s fault and that all blame for current and future messes sits squarely with the ANC.

It’s a solid effort, but I’m not sure the logic holds up: after all, if you’re standing in a rotten tenement block and decide to yank out the one beam that’s holding the whole wretched thing upright, you can’t really expect the now-homeless inhabitants to value your explanation about corrupt builders and negligent slumlords. 

Which brings us back to why Ramaphosa probably isn’t that worried about being recalled. 

It goes without saying that he has been a disappointment, though that faintly resigned word doesn’t seem to cover all the times he’s been cynical or aggressively inept or has simply gaslit us, whether pretending to be shocked by events that toddlers have already taken in their stride, or bewailing the corruption of the Zuma cabal while dirty cadres make merry in his government and the National Prosecuting Authority is deliberately starved to death on his watch. 

These things are impossible to measure, but there is a fairly good chance that he has done more to improve the material and emotional wellbeing of Vladimir Putin than he has for tens of millions of South Africans.

But what the DA’s threat has once again thrust into the spotlight — indeed, what supplied the enriched uranium to make it a threat in the first place — is the question that hangs over this country and lurches a little closer every year: what happens after Ramaphosa? 

The DA clearly doesn’t have an answer: by taking the position that Ramaphosa’s axing would unleash very, very bad things, it was openly admitting that it doesn’t see itself being able to calm the chaos.

No wonder, then, that it has chosen to shuffle back towards the uncomfortable, peevish status quo: Steenhuisen has decided the latest red line was probably more of a pinkish mauve. The DA will stay in the government of national unity. Ramaphosa lives on.

And so we return to the daily dramas, ignoring the ticking of the clock as the next four years rush by; hoping something or someone will come along … 

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.