The Economist was brutal in its description of Liz Truss during her brief time as British prime minister. “Take away the 10 days of mourning after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and she had seven days in control. That is roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce.”
That’s where Cyril Ramaphosa is right now. However long he takes twisting and turning, consulting, the lettuce will rot. He may choose lawfare. Fine. He and his friends have all the money. But his political and moral standing is gone.
We have been here before with his predecessor, he who does not deserve to be named. The ANC had a political problem with him, and it chose the ostrich route. The problem did not go away until the Mogoeng judgment of the Constitutional Court on the Nkandla scandal.
Politics never trumps lawfare. It simply does not happen. The ANC is not capable of planning. It never had a strategy for the scenario in which its president could be impeached. And Ramaphosa is no teflon don. He is a smart, thin-skinned man with dysfunctional political antennae.
We need to go back to why that other guy chose Ramaphosa as his running mate in 2012: he needed credibility. That’s the reason the ANC elected Ramaphosa as its head in 2017. Now that sheen of electoral credibility is gone.
Mind you, Ramaphosa behaves as if he has something to hide. He has yet to take the nation into his confidence about Phala Phala. He waits for accusations that rear their heads, and responds only to those. He does not take us, the nation, as his first stakeholder.
People argue, fallaciously, that an alternative must exist before we can dump the ANC in large numbers. That is the equivalent of the National Party arguing in 1991 that the ANC was not ready to govern. Of course, it wasn’t ready, but the time to ditch apartheid had come
We don’t know how the Phala Phala saga will unfold. The president behaves like a defence attorney rather than our leader.
There is a strong probability he will be the ANC’s last head of state, as the chances of a terrible loss in 2024 are increasing — not to mention the usual splinters that come around every five years or so.
Whatever transpires this month at the Nasrec conference, the damage is done. The general is wounded, and his army is weak. So weak that the so-called RETards are on the rampage, marching onward into the national executive committee.
Bathabile Dlamini and many of her friends might just make it. You know why? That camp has been on the ground campaigning, while the Ramaphosa camp is stuck in cabinet meetings.
Also, in 2012, when Ramaphosa was unveiled as that other man’s bride, he never bothered to check what kind of prenuptial agrement was in place.
Well, the ANC took a decision at that conference that NEC members were required to have had 10 years of unbroken leadership service. What that means is anyone who was not a member in good standing in 2012 cannot make it into the NEC in 2022.
So, the party locked out potential leaders. If someone like Sim Tshabalala, Standard Bank CEO, wants to join and serve in the NEC once he retires, he needs to wait 10 years.
The ANC's future leaders will come from those who never experienced a gruelling politicisation. Julius Malema was kicked out of the ANC and took its members in tow. Those younger than 34 years old in the ANC Youth League have had no experience of youth formation programmes or political incubation, unlike those from the Malema era and previous generations.
The ANC is long dead. What we have are people abusing its glorious brand for political careerism. South Africans generally suffer from a poverty of the imagination and cannot envisage life without this abusive lot. It’s a case of Stockholm syndrome.
People argue, fallaciously, that an alternative must exist before we can dump the ANC in large numbers. That is the equivalent of the National Party arguing in 1991 that the ANC was not ready to govern. Of course, it wasn’t ready, but the time to ditch apartheid had come.
Our short-term future is that of coalition governments as a necessary rite of passage to a new politics. What could be worse than the tripartite alliance? If we focus on public institutions and a deepening of democracy, we can keep anyone in check.
Some people worry that coalitions are volatile. Well, so is the tripartite alliance, and we have been under its spell for almost three decades.
Speaking of volatility, we should brace ourselves for more. The ANC will play the markets like a broken guitar this month. Just watch. It’s like way back when that short guy was our finance minister for four days. Volatility, our long-lost friend, is back.
When the markets are played that way, the Reserve Bank has to consider when to intervene. But when will the Bank tell us about the forex dealings in the Phala Phala scandal? Nasrec will be interesting for bond and currency traders.
Back to the original question: How long will the lettuce last on the shelf? At least Truss was in power, never mind her bad decisions. History will judge Ramaphosa harshly: as simply a man who was in office but not in power.
• Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory
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