Extract
Truth was the first casualty in the extremely damaging spat over the Reserve Bank last week. The rand tanked. Investors got the jitters. Ratings agencies raised eyebrows. Alarm bells rang everywhere. Confusion and uncertainty heightened as lies reigned supreme.
So here are some truths and some untruths; this is what’s really happening.
The Ace Magashule and Jacob Zuma supporters within the ANC and its national executive committee are absolutely right. Magashule said and did nothing wrong last Tuesday when he declared that the ANC’s lekgotla had resolved that the central bank’s mandate should be expanded.
This was a resolution from the ANC’s Nasrec conference in December 2017, as Zuma gleefully tweeted in the aftermath of the spat.
The ANC also resolved at that conference that it will amend the constitution to allow for land to be expropriated without compensation. It added a rejoinder that expropriation must first pass a “sustainability test”, not to threaten food security or undermine the economy.
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The truth has to be faced in its totality and not enjoyed for the bits that one agrees with and so it is worth remembering how these two resolutions came about. The Nasrec conference was so bitter and divided that at some point it seemed that the ANC might split as the Zuma-Magashule Radical Economic Transformation grouping faced off in election battles with the Cyril Ramaphosa faction. The Zuma faction believed its candidate, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, was headed for a win.
Changing the mandate of the Reserve Bank or expropriating land without compensation will not solve SA’s poverty, unemployment, inequality and economic growth problems. They are likely to worsen them.
Disaster struck. The then Mpumalanga provincial chair and premier, David Mabuza, executed an about-turn and abandoned the Zuma crowd at the very last minute and encouraged his supporters to switch sides. Ramaphosa won the presidency by a slim margin.
At any point the Zuma crowd can turn around and say that its deployees are not implementing its mandate and that they should be recalled
Having lost the presidency to Ramaphosa, the national chairpersonship to Gwede Mantashe and the deputy presidency to Mabuza, the Zuma crowd really only had Magashule as secretary-general and Jessie Duarte as his deputy.
They were gutted, but they chose not to be defeated. They laid booby traps for the Ramaphosa crowd. They forced a fight on the conference floor over the land issue that led to fisticuffs and forced Mantashe to take over the running of the session and accede to the demand that expropriation without compensation be adopted as a conference resolution. They also went to the economic transformation session and forced the Reserve Bank nationalisation issue.
These are dangerous booby traps. The entire list of ANC candidates is tasked with delivering on these mandates. The executive that Ramaphosa has appointed has the same duty. At any point the Zuma crowd can turn around and say that its deployees are not implementing its mandate and that they should be recalled.
This has been done before. That’s how September 2008 happened, when Thabo Mbeki was recalled for the dodgiest of reasons (he allegedly was using state institutions to fight political battles, a claim that we now know was essentially manufactured to protect Jacob Zuma). Zuma himself was removed this way in February 2018, although in his case the reasons were legitimate.
The Ramaphosa faction is losing the land and Reserve Bank battle to the Zuma faction and to the EFF, who are ideological peas in a pod
Changing the mandate of the Reserve Bank or expropriating land without compensation will not solve SA’s poverty, unemployment, inequality and economic growth problems. They are likely to worsen them. So those two resolutions have nothing to do with the poor. They were adopted to trip Ramaphosa up, and those who are acting like zealots over them are implementing the Zuma-Gupta-Magashule plan to shuffle him out of power and return us to the dark 2008-17 years.
The Ramaphosa faction is losing the land and Reserve Bank battle to the Zuma faction and to the EFF, who are ideological peas in a pod. In explaining the contentious resolutions, ANC economic transformation chief Enoch Godongwana said on December 20 2017 at the Nasrec conference: “No change in the constitution, no change in the Reserve Bank Act … We’ve also said it’s not likely to have an impact at all because shareholders in the Reserve Bank do not affect monetary policy in any way.”
Well, the ANC will be changing the constitution to allow for expropriation of land without compensation. The EFF will be putting forward a motion to nationalise the Reserve Bank. The ANC’s members of parliament will pile in to support that populist motion, too.
They will forget Ramaphosa’s media statement last week, which read: “It is our desire for the Reserve Bank to be publicly owned. However, we recognise that this will come at a cost, which given our current economic and fiscal situation, is simply not prudent.”
Prudence is not a word that matters in factional warfare. It doesn’t matter to the Zuma crowd. They want him out. They want a reason to do it. They will use his “failure to implement Nasrec resolutions” or will use rulings by the serial loser of court cases, the public protector, to nail him.
Ramaphosa should realise this: He is in an all-out war. They will stop at nothing to destroy him.
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