MAKHUDU SEFARA | Poor Cyril, his presidency has never stood a chance

It is hard not to be impatient with President Cyril Ramaphosa because his moves are, though at times strategic, painfully slow. There are days when impatience makes way for pity. It’s impossible for it not to.

Our poor president — OK, I know he is rich, but allow me this — has not really had time to be such. He has trudged from one major crisis to another and, before we know it, his term will be over. His turn as ANC leader ends next year, anyway. 

During all the drama we have been through as a country, Ramaphosa has been bogged down by developments beyond his control, such as Covid-19. He has not had time to craft and implement a vision of his own. Think of it in terms of those who came before him. President Nelson Mandela had a bit of time to show us that reconciliation is possible, even during the hardest of times. He kept a tenuous peace in a fractured country. President Thabo Mbeki had time to force us to look at the Two Nations through an economic lens and did his best to run the economy better than anyone has seen. President Jacob Zuma discarded convicted fraudster Schabir Shaik and got on with the programme with the Gupta brothers, creating challenges we will deal with for the next couple of decades. Enter President Cyril Ramaphosa. 

No sooner had he arrived at the Union Building than SA was downgraded to junk by ratings agencies, not because of what he did or didn’t do, but because his jailed predecessor had a field day on a wrecking ball atop our economy. 

So right there, Ramaphosa’s agenda was decided for him, even before he could utter his favourite words, “Fellow South Africans”. He urgently needed an economic programme to reverse our junk status. He has come up with the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan. Mbeki, our economic tsar, has said the plan is a vision, but Ramaphosa insists it’s a plan. Our economy has, meanwhile, got worse and we have moved further down the junk abyss. While he waited to see if his plan would yield results, Covid-19 struck, disrupting not only his objectives, but those of economies around the world and life as we knew it. 

But Ramaphosa tries to paper over ANC cracks and considers himself a messiah of the organisation who will work with those who don’t support him, in critical positions. He is, after all, a Mr Unity of sorts. Yet, right in his face, this 'unity' is undoing everything he is trying to build.

But as he walked around Gauteng vaccine sites yesterday, content that government has recovered from its slow rollout start, Transnet, responsible for our ports and the movement of crucial cargo between cities — the engine of our economy — suffered an IT breach, taking operations back to days of paperwork. Is it linked to the mayhem we saw in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal? Does it matter? All we want from our poor president is an economy that is not lurching from one crisis to another. Employment for the poor. A stable environment for small-business people. Infrastructure that’s not in ruins because some people manipulate the poor and unleash damage that takes our development back many years. A police force, supported by the defence force, that can stand its ground and is not caught napping. One that can take action against the vigilantes of Phoenix, murders at the hands of whom pushed the area close to a precipice. 

But Ramaphosa tries to paper over ANC cracks and considers himself a messiah of the organisation who will work with those who don’t support him, in critical positions. He is, after all, a Mr Unity of sorts. Yet right in his face, this “unity” is undoing everything he is trying to build. On Thursday, he told reporters in Gauteng: “We have basically said let’s stop the squabbling in public.” Yes, that’s our president putting his foot down after spectacular scenes of security cluster ministers accusing each other of lying and not taking accountability for the mayhem earlier this month.

But the truth is, this is what Ramaphosa has been doing since coming to office. He finds a crisis, papers over it, or perhaps establishes a commission, but often takes too long to make any meaningful decision. 

His first problem is that he has an intelligence minister he can’t trust, a minister believed to be close to his jailed predecessor. Which president in the world allows that? Anybody? And he has been looking at this for three years, studying it, thinking of appointing a commission on it, deciding on cabinet changes he will make, and so the story goes. 

When KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng explode, costing billions, he will move at a snail’s pace to make a call. Perhaps only we see the urgency of his security issues. “We have basically said, let’s stop the squabbling in public,” he tells us. And that, fellow South Africans, is progress. It may not sound like it, but that’s our man, right there.

And his response to Phoenix? “We are obviously very worried about what happened in Phoenix. It has evoked a lot of feelings on all sides. We empathise with them because some of the incidents that took place in Phoenix are simply what we do not want to have in our country, where there was a measure of vigilantism and targeting of people.” What can he say? The criminal justice cluster is dysfunctional. It makes him look incompetent. And before we know it, his five years at the Union Buildings will have come to an end and the question will be: if Mandela was about reconciliation, Mbeki about the economy and Zuma, well, never mind, how will we describe Ramaphosa? Trouble-shooter? It is hard not to pity him.