It is not every day that a former president castigates a sitting head of state for poor stewardship of the economy and society, but typically when it happens it is usually with reason.
That is exactly what happened when Thabo Mbeki, SA president between 1999 and 2008, took President Cyril Ramaphosa to task for failing to make good on his promises to lay out an agenda on jobs, the economy and rising inequality.
“There is no national plan to address these challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality. It doesn’t exist. I’m saying to serve the people, it requires that,” Mbeki said at the memorial service of ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte in Johannesburg last week. “Comrade Cyril Ramaphosa when he delivered his state of the nation address in February … said in 100 days there must be an agreed social compact to address these matters. Nothing has happened. Nothing.”
It has been a long time coming. Mbeki’s rebuke is fair, timely and necessary.
Ramaphosa helped the ANC roll to a national election victory in 2019, riding on promises to jump-start the economy that has hardly grown in the past decade since skidding with the rest of the world in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Yes, Ramaphosa has not been idle after taking the reins of a country that was the subject of a state capture corruption cancer that corroded almost every layer of the government, and laid to waste state-owned companies such as Eskom and the SA Revenue Service. The problem is he has nothing to show for those steps, including liberalising the electricity sector, auctioning off badly needed radio frequency spectrum and laying out plans to help fix the dysfunctional Transnet.
A cursory glance of economic data such as poverty levels, economic growth and the gap between the rich and the poor tells you that those steps are insufficient. They also face opposition from a faction allied to his predecessor Jacob Zuma within the ANC and underscore the party’s own underlying thinking not to be seen as too business-friendly lest it makes chunks of its frustrated and dwindling electoral support easy pickings for the ultra-left EFF.
One would have thought Ramaphosa, who has presided over an economy that has shed jobs almost every quarter since he took over, would have used the economic data and the unmistakable loss of electoral support to convince his comrades that SA needs nothing less than unpopular and undoubtedly painful decisions, particularly on power utility Eskom and SAA.
Mbeki’s criticisms could not have come at a worse time for Ramaphosa, who is trying to fend off allegations of money-laundering and theft at his Phala Phala farm related to the confirmed robbery of millions of dollars. His handling of the scandal has raised uncomfortable questions about his pledges to be transparent, and threaten to cast a shadow over his commitment to crack down on corruption and malfeasance.
Ramaphosa may have escaped disruptive and prolonged boos and jeering from the ANC members at ANC KwaZulu-Natal provincial elective conference on Sunday, but he may be running out of luck for missing self-imposed deadlines on some of the pressing issues facing the country.
While Mbeki focused largely on Ramaphosa’s failure to make good on a promise to announce a programme within 100 days to lift growth when he delivered his state of the nation address in February, the list of broken promises under his leadership is long.
Ramaphosa has also yet to deliver an emergency plan he said two weeks ago would be announced “in the coming days” to address the energy crisis. SA and investors are yet to see a plan on how to deal with Eskom’s crippling debt, and it is looking likely that even breaking up the utility without addressing overstaffing sets us up for yet another false dawn.
Most South Africans rallied behind Ramaphosa in 2019 in the hope that he would leave behind a legacy of putting millions into jobs, fighting corruption and building what he calls an ethical and capable state. That hope is barely flickering.
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