Watching the national dialogue devolve into the farce it was inevitably destined to be left me wondering whether President Cyril Ramaphosa is already a lame duck with 28 months to go before the 2027 ANC elective conference.
Ramaphosa has proved unable or unwilling to confront the vested interests that strangle reform. He governs not as a reformer but as a conciliator-in-chief, forever searching for consensus in a political culture defined by obstruction. The result is drift, paralysis and decay.
Business Leadership SA’s (BLSA) new SA Reform Tracker is damning. Out of 240 promised reforms, only 26 are complete. Fifty-nine show strong progress. Most, more than 100, are “on track but need attention”. Nineteen are stalled outright.
Governing is boring. It requires decisions, deadlines and discipline. It is not about podiums and endless promises. Ramaphosa has shown none of the urgency or steel required — to think some, your correspondent included, held out hope for some masterful long game.
Every blocked reform tells the same story. Rail devolution has been promised for years, yet no draft strategy exists. Municipal debt suffocates Eskom, but the government will not confront delinquent municipalities. Transnet remains crippled, downgraded yet again by ratings agencies for lack of progress.
Ramaphosa cannot even discipline state-owned enterprises. Eskom launched a legal war against electricity trading licences, in effect attacking the government’s own policy. One can sympathise to an extent when Eskom complains that it cannot get its primary debtors — local government customers — to pay. Only after the electricity minister intervened was the lawsuit withdrawn.
This is not a technical problem. It is a political one. Reform requires confrontation. It requires telling powerful unions, municipalities and factions inside the ANC that the game is up. Ramaphosa has never shown the stomach for this fight. He dithers, delays and retreats while SA pays the price.
The contrast with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) process is stark. There, one empowered official, Ismail Momoniat, was given the mandate to co-ordinate and the authority to deliver. He did so. SA is on course to exit the greylist. And Momoniat deserves the plaudits.
The tragedy is that Ramaphosa had the mandate. He had the trust of business, labour and civil society. He had the political capital to drive through painful but necessary reforms. He squandered it.
The lesson is obvious: where power and responsibility are clear, reforms succeed. Where Ramaphosa leads, they stall. Yes, load-shedding has abated. But it has been achieved largely through private investment in solar and self-generation, not by Eskom’s renaissance. The next crisis is grid transmission and it’s already looming large. Fourteen thousand kilometres of new lines are needed at a cost of R400bn. Without them, new generation cannot be connected.
Thabo Molekoa, chair and MD of Siemens Energy Southern and Eastern Africa, and a member of the G20 Energy Task Force, calls this SA’s “Rubicon moment”. He is being diplomatic. It is less a Rubicon to be crossed than a swamp into which the government is sinking, boots and all. The real danger is the complacency that has settled in as ministers congratulate themselves while procurement stalls and deadlines are missed by years, not months. The Integrated Resource Plan, the lodestar of energy policy, has become a phantom, forever “imminent,” never delivered.
The government talks glibly of 14,000km of new transmission lines. It will not happen. Not with Eskom’s hollowed-out capacity, not with a skills pipeline running dry, not with procurement timelines stretching into the next decade. The unbundling of Eskom’s transmission arm limps along at a pace Molekoa charitably calls “as fast as we can”, the genteel euphemism for bureaucratic sabotage.
Does Ramaphosa grasp the urgency? If he does, he hides it well. Instead of championing reform, his government tolerates sabotage from its own entities, such as the head of the SA National Defence Force jetting off to Iran in the middle of sensitive trade negotiations. Instead of firing Gen Rudzani Maphwanya, his legacy will be remembered for former DA deputy minister Andrew Whitfield’s axing on far more spurious grounds.
The tariff war with Washington illustrates the cost of fragility. Economists estimate a 0.4 percentage point GDP hit from US tariffs. On a base of 0.9% growth, that is devastating. In a healthy economy growing at 3%-4%, it would be manageable.
Why so fragile? Because reforms that would lower costs and raise competitiveness were never pursued. Only when crisis hits does government scramble — for example, by temporarily suspending competition rules to allow exporters to co-operate. This is an admission of failure. These rules should have been reformed years ago. Economic reform cannot succeed without governance reform. And here, the BLSA tracker is flashing red.
The national dialogue convention was supposed to build consensus. Instead, it collapsed under its own incoherence. Poorly prepared, boycotted by leading actors and dismissed by markets as theatre, it was another symbol of SA’s inability to get things right the first time. Ramaphosa presides, as always, over the wreckage, unwilling to impose order, incapable of driving urgency.
Every year of delay compounds the damage. Growth stagnates. Investment contracts. Unemployment rises. Inequality deepens. Credibility erodes. Yes, there have been wins: visas, FATF, rooftop solar. But these are exceptions, not proof of momentum.
The tragedy is that Ramaphosa had the mandate. He had the trust of business, labour and civil society. He had the political capital to drive through painful but necessary reforms. He squandered it. His legacy is not a “new dawn”. It is the wasted decade’s sequel, where corruption remains rampant filmed in upmarket restaurants in white Dior bags.
SA does not have the luxury of time. Its growth is too weak, its state too fragile, its people too poor. Reform delayed is reform denied.
Ramaphosa has failed to lead. And business leaders are already nervously asking: who comes next? Despite all signs pointing to the ANC’s weakened standing in future coalitions it remains, despite all its failings, the fulcrum.
The clearly compromised deputy president, Paul Mashatile, lurks in the shadows. Some whisper that billionaire BEE magnate Patrice Motsepe or the more credible electricity minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, are waiting in the wings. And then there’s Fikile “Fear Fokol” Mbalula.
Heaven help us.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV's ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at michael@fmr.co.za.
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