“The allegations made in this media briefing raise serious concerns about the constitution, the rule of law and national security.
“These allegations, if proven true, threaten to undermine the confidence of South Africans in the ability of the SA Police Service to protect them and to effectively fight crime and corruption.”
So said President Cyril Ramaphosa on July 13, referring to Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s press conference a week earlier, in which the KwaZulu-Natal provincial commissioner alleged that a sophisticated criminal syndicate had infiltrated the SAPS, intelligence structures and the judiciary, and that the police minister had colluded to disband the KwaZulu-Natal political killings task team.
We leant in as Ramaphosa read the speech, wrapped with urgent rhetoric, setting up an independent commission of inquiry with tight deadlines, picking deputy chief justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga as its head and suspending Senzo Mchunu as police minister with immediate effect.
So far, so good.
Fast forward to a week before Madlanga’s kickoff and the inquiry is still homeless. No venue, no chairs, no sound system. Ramaphosa’s “urgent and comprehensive investigation” now reads like a headline with no story behind it.
Urgent proclamation about national security without execution is just noise. Every week the commission sits idle is another week South Africans lose faith in both the inquiry and its champion, Ramaphosa.
It’s tempting to point the blame solely at the justice department. Its tenders dragged, vendor engagements sputtered and a simple RFP for chairs morphed into a Kafkaesque ordeal.
But blaming Mmamoloko Kubayi, who leads the department, for a bungled RFP is cheap scapegoating. Kubayi must own the nuts and bolts of getting the inquiry off the ground, to be sure, but routine hiccups don’t derail a presidential inquiry of this importance. The deeper failure lies at the top.
Ramaphosa signed off on “immediate effect”, three and six-month interim reports, and an urgent and comprehensive remit. He set the deadlines, announced the urgency and spun the headlines — but failed to install the executive muscle needed to meet them. Delegation without oversight is abdication, and missed milestones add to a laundry list of false dawns.
Meanwhile, factional bloodletting in the SAPS compounds the damage. The public spat between Fannie Masemola and his deputy, Shadrack Sibiya, over the KwaZulu-Natal political killings at the right time is a window into a security cluster that defies central command. When police bosses openly accuse each other of mutiny, it prompts Ramaphosa to install discipline at the top.
— Urgent proclamation about national security without execution is just noise
Business, Ramaphosa’s staunchest cheerleader, already uneasy over the slow pace of reforms, will add a president who can’t even launch his own commission of inquiry to its growing list of reservations.
The Madlanga delay sums up every promise Ramaphosa has made. Good on intent, short on delivery. His half-baked measures have yielded halfhearted results, leaving gridlocked ports as routine as his political spin.
He pitched himself in 2018 as a reform tsar, vowing to jump-start an economy ravaged by state capture and put millions into jobs. Instead, under his watch, SA has suffered seven out of 27 quarters of economic decline, and unemployment has crept up in almost every quarter, from about 27% to just over 33%.
Ramaphosa dithered for two years after NPA boss Shamila Batohi formally urged him to suspend Andrew Chauke, who held a high-profile role as the head of NPA in Gauteng until his suspension on the spot last month over botched high-profile prosecutions and withdrawals of state capture cases.
And Ramaphosa’s much-vaunted national dialogue has careened into farce. It’s become a deluxe talk shop spurned by the very parties it was meant to woo, and a PR vanity project rather than a policy lifeline.
The emerging narrative of this presidency is that urgency is rhetorical and delivery is optional.
Whether it’s securing chairs for Madlanga or suspending a prosecutor or two after the alarm was raised, the pattern is the same.
This editorial is as much a critique of Ramaphosa’s presidency as it is a call for him to deliver. If you can’t swap “family meetings” for project management, the question is not whether you still have ideas, but whether you have the staying power to see them through.
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