In the 2016 US presidential election, American satirist and mainstream conservative PJ O’Rourke endorsed Hillary Clinton with a magnificent backhander:
“I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she’s way behind in second place. She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
His endorsement, hardly trumpeted by the Democrats, was proved prescient when the first place in abnormal politics, Donald Trump, won the contest and unleashed his brand of grievance-filled indecorous bullying politics from the Oval Office.
Many opposition supporters in SA, who by December 2017 had endured over two decades of the ANC ransacking of the state, doubtless had a similar reaction to the narrow victory eked out by Cyril Ramaphosa against the Jacob Zuma-RET brigade fronted by its candidate, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. He stood for the restoration of normalcy in place of the abnormal misgovernance of his predecessor.
He offered no change of direction, no policy reset and no bold suggestions for rightsizing the ship of state. Unless you count such airy-fairy clichés such as “New Dawn” and “the lost decade” and a vague offer of “reform” as a decisive policy programme. But he wasn’t corrupt or crooked and he spoke in joined-up sentences and could read a set of figures fluently. The put-down offered about another Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, that “his smile was his philosophy” seemed a good fit for Ramaphosa too.
Leaping over this low bar, given the abyss into which the Zuma and his gang of enablers and beneficiaries had plunged the country, meant an almost national — outside Nkandla and other redoubts of the RET brigands — sigh of relief and huge expectation greeted Ramaphosa’s election as president four years ago.
If you are a movie or streaming buff you might have enjoyed some escapist fare during the long harsh lockdown by viewing the genre termed “alternate history”. Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, for example, is a TV series produced by Ridley Scott, with the dystopian premise depicting a parallel universe where Germany and Japan, the victors of World War 2, have split the US into the Greater Nazi Reich in the east (headquartered in New York City), with Japan holding sway in the west in the Japanese Pacific States (capital – San Francisco).
Just consider a local alternate history and imagine that a bit more taxpayer cash had been sprayed around Nasrec in December 2017. In that case, Thursday’s state of the nation address would be delivered by Dlamini-Zuma. And doubtless — in the event of her victory then — today the ANC might have formally split on the back of around 40% of the national vote in last year’s municipal elections. Her “popularity” would have been even less than her party’s whereas with Ramaphosa, warts and all, it is the reverse.
However, it is equally arguable that the largely charmless Dlamini-Zuma, not a vote winner at the polls, would have had a much greater grip on her government and its senior officials. And would have ruled with a rod of iron in the case of any insurrectionists within its ranks. Given as well that the July riots were instigated apparently (but who knows since no one of significance has been indicted seven months later?) by personalities close to Jacob Zuma, the 350 deaths and R50bn worth of property torched might never have happened. Their control of the state would never have been interrupted.
By contrast, Ramaphosa’s serial failures in office were to a significant degree both self-made and situational. On the situational: he inherited a dysfunctional state, collapsed and corrupted by the Zuma faction. A state fuelled by the failed policies of cadre deployment, aggressive skills shedding under the mantle of “transformation” and an intense racial nationalism which made enemies of both minorities and the private sector, which to the ANC are often two sides of a disreputable coin.
But Ramaphosa’s personal choices aggravated rather than improved the weak seat he now occupies behind the flummery of the high office he ostensibly holds, however precariously. A bolder president would have flushed out the Zuma holdovers crippling the state. A braver president would have taken the high road of real economic reform, not the agonisingly slow dribbling out of a few safe options (corporatising the ports, spectrum auctions, the splitting of Eskom and the provision of additional private electricity supply). Anyway, these have been promised over the past four years and have yet to see the light of day.
A courageous president would have placed the country ahead of party, instead of the current president offering the sad rejoinder last August that he would rather be a weak president than preside over the disunity of the ANC.
On Monday, the country received official confirmation that Ramaphosa is a weak president heading a disunited party. His split ANC bears heavy responsibility for the July insurrection. The investigating panel cited that “factions within the ANC” contributed to the unrest and posed a risk to the “national security”. It called for what Ramaphosa had long promised but never delivered on, that this factionalism needs to be addressed or another looting frenzy awaits us.
But on his own performance as country CEO, chair of the National Security Council (missing in action) and head of the cabinet, the report was unsparing in its findings: it cited “significant intelligence failures”, a police force and intelligence service asleep at the switch, warring ministers and dysfunctional relationships between political heads and senior commanders.
Doubtless though, Ramaphosa will offer the same gruel of warmed up old promises, sunny predictions of change around the corner and a dose of optimism. That might have worked in past addresses, but as Voltaire reminds us, “optimism is a form of madness maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong”. So clichés from the past are no solution for the present.
He should, though, at this fraught moment of national peril, remind himself as country leader that the entire political spectrum — from libertarians who believe in a restricted “nightwatchman state” to full blooded socialists who perceive the munificence of the state as endless and its resources bottomless — have one thing in common.
It is the belief, or indeed contract with the government, that everyone (bar the Fallists and Zumaites) hold to the social contract. This means some of liberties and freedoms of citizens are surrendered to the state only on the equal obligation of the state to protect lives, limbs and property.
The panel report makes clear that Ramaphosa’s government breached, fundamentally, its social contract with its citizens.
Thursday’s Sona will indicate how he intends to heal the breach. If indeed he can.
Leon, a former leader of the opposition, now chairs Resolve Communications.
@TonyLeonSA.
Featured in The Sunday Times Daily
