In 1908, Winston Churchill was first appointed to the British cabinet. He would go on to star at the centre of power, on and off, for another 50 years.
Later, recalling his first summons to high office by Prime Minister HH Asquith, he wrote: “When offering me Cabinet office in his government in 1908, he [Asquith] repeated to me Mr Gladstone’s saying, ‘The first essential for a prime minister is to be a good butcher,’ and he added, ‘There are several who must be pole-axed now.’ They were. Loyal as he was to his colleagues, he never shrank when the time came, and public need required it, from putting them aside once and for all. Personal friendship might survive if it would. Political association was finished. But how else can states be governed?”
This extract from an essay Churchill had written in 1937 is unlikely to have crossed the desk of our president, and its thoughts improbably do not sit high in the mind of Cyril Ramaphosa.
Yet judging from the (non) results of his Cabinet reshuffle last week, he has little interest in good governance of his own state. No political butcher swinging the axe of retrenchment for ministerial miscreants, his tools of trade are the combination of soft-shoe shuffle and factional appeasement. A sort of local version of Churchill’s lamentable prime ministerial predecessor, Neville Chamberlain.
The inexplicable retention of compromised minister Thembi Simelane in his Cabinet not only suggests that promises of ‘renewal’ in the fight against corruption are pure piffle, but places Ramaphosa himself in the dock as a co-accused.
Readers might, in this regard, recall Ramaphosa’s cri de couer back in August 2020 he wrote that ‘ethical and moral leadership was needed in the collective fight against corruption’. He was then responding to public outrage that 60 percent of emergency procurements during the Covid-19 pandemic, were revealed to have been spent on businesses that were politically connected to leading ANC personalities. Ramaphosa condemned these predators and their predations as “a pack of hyenas circling a wounded prey”.
Simelane, until last week, was the political head of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), which, even by the depressed standards of local mediocrity and all-around inertness, stands in a league of its own. She and her appointing authority (Ramaphosa) thought nothing for more than 80 days of her retaining this post despite the damning reports implicating her in “the looting of the VBS Mutual Bank via a R 575 000 loan from Gundo Wealth Solutions,” according to a recent editorial.
Further, her inability to explain her lavish lifestyle and high-end shopping sprees, unmatched by her income, did not prevent her retention at the top, albeit now in a different ministry. Beyond his basic besmirchment of high office with such a compromised cadre in the nation’s Cabinet, whose apparent retention is owed to her loyalty to Ramaphosa, another question is begged.
What hope for the justice ministry and the NPA as another minister, with no legal background or qualification, is entrusted to sit atop the ministry charged with arresting the corrupt and the criminal?
Actually, to be perfectly fair to the new incumbent, Mmaloko Kubayi, she is a reminder that ignorance of the law might be no excuse in your defence, but it is a mighty good calling card to become Minister of Justice.
‘Lawless’ Minister of Justice
In June 2023, the labour court found that when Kubayi was Minister of Human Settlements (where “high flying adored”‘ Simelane has been sent) she unlawfully sacked her departmental director. In blatant defiance or ignorance of the labour laws – never mind basic decency – the unfortunate official, Ms Nelly Letsholonanye, was fired by Kubayi after Madam Minister was stuck in an elevator for an hour. The court ordered her immediate reinstatement. It held, “the minister’s conduct was unlawful. Such conduct should not be condoned by courts of law. The court cannot and should not turn a blind eye to injustice and lawlessness”.
The justice ministry is also, among other remits, responsible for policing the conduct of all corporations, including banks. In this regard no doubt the minister’s attack last year on SA banks for alleged racial discriminatory practices in home loans is worth reprising. The data she offered as proof of this was immediately discredited by the Banking Associator’s Bongiwe Kunene, who properly said the ‘ability to repay the loan” was the only criterion. Given her penchant for shooting from the hip, uninformed by careful and proper consideration of the facts suggests stormy times ahead in the Ministry of Justice and the courts of law.
Deposed butcher of Syria
If Ramaphosa is a poor political butcher when it comes to Cabinet cuts, what then about another ministry, international relations and co-operation, as it confronts the fall of a real butcher, the just deposed president of Syria, Bashar Al-Assad?
Well here the ministry suggests no update to the old playbook. You will search in vain the Dirco archive to find a remonstration against the now vanquished Assad and his murderous regime. In August 2013, when the Assad regime was first threatened by a popular uprising against his tyrannous regime, he used missiles against his own population in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta and poisoned them with Sarin gas, a substance declared illegal since 1918.
In his recent memoirs, former British prime minister Boris Johnson wrote: “Children died, breathless and frothing, their skin white and their pupils shrunken to dots. The west -having threatened explicitly to punish any such action was duly outraged. We huffed. We puffed. We then did nothing.’
South Africa did even less than this, it said nothing at all. Despite finding a spare R95 million recently to drag Isreal to the International Court of Justice for alleged genocide against Gazans, when the “butcher of Damascus” reined poison gas on his own people, we forbore even the mildest criticism.
Still, there is a grim consistency in Dirco regardless of having a relatively new minister, Ronald Lamola, at the helm. Just two days before Assad fled his own country to escape to Moscow, Dirco signalled it was still on his side. It expressed “grave concern following the offensive attacks on the governance of Aleppo and Idlib…South Africa stands in solidarity with the government and people of Syria”. The only problem, one of many here, is that the people of Syria, watching their untrammelled joy at the ousting of Alssad, did not share Dirco’s wish for their own government.
Dirco also drew attention to the fact that the new de facto regime which had replaced Assad – HTS – is a “terrorist organisation”. And indeed, might be on par with the bloody Assad family. But Dirco’s risible suggestion that the conditions of torture and terror, which Assad used to the very end to prop up his regime, could be “resolved in a peaceful manner” via ‘an inclusive dialogue” is just pathetic. However, our international relations often mimic the needs or aspirations of Iran or Russia, the two biggest losers, along with the Assad regime, of the events in Syria.
At home and abroad then not much sign of the national or international renewal long promised, still to be sighted.
