Jeepers, how did we get here? We have always been here. It is just that the penny has finally dropped, and it has dawned on many that President Cyril Ramaphosa has no fire in him.
The non-reshuffle on Monday confirmed that Ramaphosa is not a politician. He is even too scared to fire someone like David Mahlobo, the water and sanitation deputy minister. Ramaphosa inherited Mahlobo from his predecessor — he who should not be named — and has kept him and other no-name politicians in the cabinet for five years.
Ramaphosa is in a dangerous position in which he believes his own spin. He had a bit of a master stroke when he revealed the non-idea of an electricity minister in February. A great decoy that should have bought him time to look at substantive solutions to the management of the energy crisis and the economy at large.
A month later, he is still spinning.
This week he revealed Kgosientsho Ramokgopa as his choice for the role. You have to wonder what, besides vanity, would make Ramokgopa accept the obvious toy phone.
Ramokgopa will soon meet his future and will regret the moment he said “yes”. He will quickly find it hard to get up and face the public with increasing load-shedding.
He will get to meet with a man who played rugby in the villages of Cala in the Eastern Cape, the real Gwede Mantashe. Mantashe is like a marauding rugby player looking to tackle underfed opponents. He was malicious and yet accurate last month when he said the electricity minister would be just a “project manager”.
Ramokgopa, our dancing master, will also have to come up against Pravin Gordhan, a man hardened during the soul-destroying days of dodging apartheid police and solitude in incarceration. Unlike his boss, Gordhan knows power and what to do with it.
Ramokgopa is at the mercy of these men, who, when it suits them, can combine to crush him while his boss turns a blind eye. Ramaphosa will instead go tend to his Ankole cattle inoculations and leave the three men trying to figure out who the real boss of Eskom is.
This week was confirmation that, politically, Ramaphosa is done
This week was confirmation that, politically, Ramaphosa is done. He needs a way out of this president thing. It is too much of a burden for him. He is even apologetic for not doing a massive reshuffle. Instead of his underlings genuflecting to curry favour with him, the chief is sheepish about firing people.
He moved Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, probably the oldest practising politician in South Africa, to a portfolio responsible for youth, among other things. He showed he did not care anymore. He is just winding down the clock. No plan, no deep reflection.
That is not how to handle power. He will soon see when the ANC runs rings around him, and plans to get rid of him.
This week's reshuffle was the act of a man lacking confidence and interest. That is precisely how he operated under that other guy, to whom he genuflected and danced for five years as his Number 2. He sat in his office, doing very little.
He is doing the same thing. His colleagues in the ANC top seven have tasted power and will not let him make their lives difficult. They want Ramaphosa — their hostage — to go to the polls next year and bring back decent numbers. They will be running his life from now on. They will create public platforms for him to perform on.
When the Phala Phala scandal rears its head again, Ramaphosa will not think twice about running for the hills. No-one will be able to stop him this time around.
In fact, not many people will want to stop him. He has demonstrated that he does not know what to do with power. He wanted this presidency gig to fill a void in him, a dream that could have been from the Mandela era. He never had a plan, and it shows.
Franz Kafka writes about this in The Metamorphosis. It is a story about a salesman who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a gigantic insect. He struggles to adjust to his new life.
That is Ramaphosa. Super wealthy and super powerful, and no clue how that came about. The salesman in The Metamorphosis hates his employer, whom he sees as a despot. He would quickly quit his job if he were not his family's sole breadwinner and working off his bankrupt father's debts.
Ramaphosa thinks critics from business are spoilt brats and his own ANC corrupt. He wishes to return to that simple boy he was born as in Chiawelo, Soweto. What do we, as South Africans, do when that moment comes? It may be sooner than we realise.
• Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory
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