President Cyril Ramaphosa is not done signing controversial bills or acting in a manner that will ruin South Africa. He has the Public Procurement Bill in his in-tray. He is leading a declining party that can only choose a futile populism that will not help its survival as it struggles to arrest an electoral decline that started in 2009.
It is hard to think of National Health Insurance and not link it to Discovery Health or its founder, Adrian Gore. Discovery Health’s share price fell by 2% this week as Ramaphosa signed the NHI bill. That’s not a big loss for a share that has gone up 1,100% in the past 20 years. The ANC has been good to Gore and his businesses. It has created a stable environment for investors to get their dividends easily. It has also destroyed the public health infrastructure it inherited from the bad apartheid government, so much so that medical aid funds have grown tremendously due to the ANC’s failures.
Gore is one of those optimistic business leaders who believe South Africa is a great investment destination. He gets used by Ebrahim Patel and his boss, Ramaphosa, to tell investors that putting money in South Africa is better than taking it elsewhere. Well, the ANC and Ramaphosa have given him a reality check by preparing a law that effectively appropriates private healthcare infrastructure.
What is sad to see is the business sector thinking Rampahosa is a good guy enslaved by a patently bad ANC. Ramaphosa has all the responsibility, skill, power, and influence to stare down his own colleagues in the ANC if he does not want NHI implemented. He can take the direct route and take on his party. He is serving his second term at the helm of the ANC anyway, which is bound to be rocky, irrespective of his stance on NHI. Or he could use the faction route and pull together a group of influential figures in the party to do his bidding. He is always going to dole out patronage after the May 29 elections, so he might as well make his appointees earn their ministerial posts.
What is sad to see is the business sector thinking Rampahosa is a good guy enslaved by a patently bad ANC
By signing the NHI bill into law, he is probably relying on the business sector to take him and the law to court. That will help him — but not the investment climate. Who will put their money in a country that, for the first time since 1994, introduces a law that expropriates private assets? Investment thrives on certainty: choose if you are nationalising or not. You can’t have it both ways.
In reality the NHI law is implementable but not everyone believes that or has the patience and grace to do the necessary investment due diligence when capital can easily be deployed elsewhere, with better returns.
What we are seeing are the actions of an ANC hostage who is biologically incapable of taking decisions that will move South Africa forward. He has a deep yearning to be a Mr Nice Guy to everyone. Self-preservation is his game, he has become a ja baas to the ANC, which has become an incorrigible destroyer of its own legacy.
You have to imagine how, if President Dolittle is so beholden to this version of the ANC, he will manage a party that will have lost outright control in both Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
His return to the Union Buildings might be through the mercy of coalition partners, who will bring their own style and demands to the national cabinet. Ramaphosa does not have the appetite to run anything decisively; how will he run a fragmented cabinet?
If anyone thought this was a man who could salvage some decency in a second term at the Union Buildings, NHI is a telling glimpse for the kumbaya-singing business leaders, revealing that the horse they are betting on has no lungs.
This week he chose to play infantile politics when, politically, it was possible to manage the matter. His predecessor, as bad as he was, single-handedly blocked the ANC from adopting the expropriation of mines as ANC policy at the Mangaung conference in 2012. Jacob Zuma handed crafters of the party’s policy document a little note (probably prepared for him by the Guptas) with the wording he wanted. Just like that, the ANC knew how to move.
NHI is not the kind of campaign matter that would earn the ANC new votes. The people being lied to about NHI giving them access to free private sector healthcare immediately after May 29 are part of the ANC’s core base. It is a segment that would vote for the ANC anyway. The sad thing is that the ANC does not realise this.
• Mkokeli is lead partner at Public Affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory
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