With GDP growth showing signs of real life and the most recent unemployment numbers falling slightly, if it were ever really on the cards, there’s little chance now that President Cyril Ramaphosa will face serious efforts to remove him from office before local government elections next year.
These could happen between next November and February 2027, but Ramaphosa’s response to US President Donald Trump’s effort to belittle last month’s G20 summit in Johannesburg by boycotting it, and then his impetuous decision to stop South Africa from participating in the 2026 G20 under US chairmanship, have given him a real boost where it matters — in the ANC national executive committee (NEC).
Only the NEC could recall him, but by standing up to Trump — first declaring that he didn’t appreciate being insulted by another country, then declining to hand over the G20 chair to a local US diplomat in Trump’s absence, and then insisting South Africa would indeed attend the 2026 G20 meetings — his weak image has been erased, at least for now.
Yet after a moral victory over Trump’s lies about white persecution in this country will come a period of great uncertainty. Preparatory US G20 meetings begin in two weeks, but will our officials be allowed into the US and G20 venues there? Given Trump’s disdain for multilateralism, there is, unsurprisingly, not much information about which meetings take place when.
For the moment, Trump is a convenient enemy. Every political leader needs one, and though Ramaphosa went out of his way in a TV address on Sunday evening to strike a conciliatory note — “we offer the people of the US nothing but goodwill and friendship” — the fact is that the tension with the US is not merely the work of local disaffected right-wing Afrikaner groups as he insists.
Ramaphosa has had plenty of time to find a way to say in public that he disapproves of the song Kill the Boer, but he never does lest it anger his own party. He had plenty of time not to sign into law the possibility of expropriating property without compensation, but he did it anyway.
While we’re told only the courts can decide those cases, Ramaphosa said nothing when deputy president Paul Mashatile told parliament last month that “the ANC is pro-expropriation without compensation and we have never deviated from that”.
What is perhaps the most worrying is the silence from the DA, once the official opposition and now Ramaphosa’s main partner in the government of national unity (GNU), as tension with the US rises and the ANC loads further economic insanity on the country. Does it have nothing to say?
A draft bill out of the department of small business will require all companies, big and small, to be licensed to operate, opening up literally millions of opportunities for officialdom to interfere in productive South African lives.
There’s buried criticism on the DA website, but there’s also a DA deputy minister, Jane Sithole, in the department itself. How has the bill survived to the point where public comments have already closed?
Anyone hoping public comment might ever stop an ANC money boondoggle is on another planet anyway, but sadly there’s no evidence yet that DA leader John Steenhuisen has a plan to stop it either.
His critics argue he needs his cabinet job. He has been forced to hand in his party credit card, allegedly after using it to buy food through Uber, and that after a judgment against him in the matter of a large unpaid debt.
He is determined to fight for re-election as DA leader in April next year, but someone may need to stand up and stop him to get some quality leadership back into the party.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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