Last Thursday in the United States, a special prosecutor, Robert K Hur, exonerated President Joe Biden on charges of mishandling classified documents in a report of more than 400 pages. But just nine words of it could mark the epitaph for the president and herald the return of Donald Trump to the White House.
Hur (appointed to office by Trump) lethally described Biden as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”.
But that is not simply a partisan view: a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 86% of Americans believe that 81-year-old Biden is too old to serve four more years as president. Already, by far, the oldest president in American history, the prospect of an 86-year-old Biden finishing his second term of office in 2028 (should he survive) is horrifying for most of his citizens.
Only the fear of what a re-elected Trump might have in store for his country and the world could save Biden from an ignominious defeat in November.
In response to the special prosecutor, Biden managed to confuse the country of Mexico with Egypt. At the same time as Biden was mangling his countries last Thursday, here at home, Cyril Ramaphosa gifted posterity with his own verbal miscues for his increasing number of opponents.
His State of the Nation speech ran to nearly 7 000 words, but just 20 or so of them could haunt Ramaphosa all the way to polling day.
On the endless electricity blackouts, he promised:
The prose had barely gone cold, when Eskom plunged the country into Stage 4 load shedding, ramping up to Stage 6 thirty-six hours after Ramaphosa’s speech concluded.
Before even Biden first won election to the US Senate in 1972, one of his Democratic presidential predecessors, Lyndon Johnson, was damned for the contrast between his denials of greater US involvement in the Vietnam War with the evidence available. There is a discrepancy between what a politician claimed to be the case and the facts of the matter. Thus, was born the term’ credibility gap’.
American columnist Walter Lippman described this “credibility gap” as a ‘”polite euphemism for deception”. Ramaphosa’s repeated promises, euphemisms, and guarantees to end load shedding here (remember his infamous pledge in 2015 that it would be over “in another 18 months to two years”?), have converted the credibility gap into a yawning chasm of total disbelief.
For all his fatuous false promises, Ramaphosa does not, as a relatively sprightly 71-year-old, have 81-year-old Biden’s excuse of cognitive frailty to fall back on. But were he to interrogate government’s culpability in our national decline, he could do worse than to look at the war on talent which, despite failures on multiple fronts, has been one of the more successful campaigns launched and won by the ANC. Here, the evidence is everywhere.
Credibility gap stretched to breaking point
And for all the other pledges in Ramaphosa’s speech to survive basic contact with reality, in a way which his “end of load shedding is within reach” did not, would require a complete removal of the core prop of government’s philosophy which has been to shred the meritocracy and replace it with the rule of the cadres and the triumph of race-based appointments “uber alles”.
Just how wide the credibility gap between presidential words and governing reality, beyond just electricity, has been stretched to breaking point, also arrived just days after the SONA spiel.
Readers who managed to make it to the end of Ramaphosa’s long speech might recall his other pledges to fix the logistics nightmare of Transnet by unblocking ports and unthrottling rail after the ruination of both by a mismanaged and corrupted Transnet – ground zero, along with Eskom, on the war on talent and the deployment of underperforming and under-skilled leadership and management.
Lo, the Sunday Times reported on the weekend that “some members of the ANC cadre deployment committee are intent on blocking appointments [of three highly rated insiders for the vacant positions of group CEO, head of Transnet Freight Rail and finance chief] having expressed transformation concerns that none of the three are black Africans”.
The three concerned are not white, but in the mad ANC universe of racial hierarchy – coloured in two cases and Indian in the third; this is an instance where “the optics will not look good”. This according to one unnamed “insider”.
Good optics trump merit and experience – never mind the consequences. Except in this case, despite another Ramaphosa pledge on winning the war on corruption the preferred candidate for the position of Transnet CEO, Mlamuli Buthelezi “was one of four executives suspended in 2019 over alleged misconduct”. This should work out well.
And perhaps, the minutes of the deployment committee, soon to be publicly released courtesy of the Democratic Alliance court battle, will shed more light on this murk.
‘Call back the past’
The best part of the SONA address was reminiscent of the old Springbok Radio series, “Call Back the Past”. Here Ramaphosa was on surer ground than the thin ice he skated with electricity and ports. He fondly recalled the achievements of our constitutional democracy and the centrality of the rule of law underpinned by an independent judiciary whose integrity, he averred, must be safeguarded.
Just before his speech, a gathering of legal luminaries was convened in Cape Town to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Constitution and the claims it made for an expanded right of administrative justice.
South African-born Sir Jeffrey Jowell is one of Britain’s leading public lawyers and he delivered a keynote speech at the event.
In one sense, Jowell anticipated Ramaphosa, offering praise for what he termed the many “innovations” of the SA Constitution, including the decision (in which I was involved) for judges here to be appointed by an independent commission [the Judicial Services Commission – JSC], “rather than by executive fiat”.
Jowell commended the “quality of South African judges, some of whom could grace the any apex court in the world”. But he followed his praise with a warning:
Unstated but quite clear, given the timeline here, Jowell was referencing the shock exclusion of Judge David Unterhalter from consideration for appointment to the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), having thrice been rejected by the same body for appointment to the apex court, the Constitutional Court. Since the redacted minutes were recently released on this decision (again on threat of a court order), we know the grisly details of this matter. It makes for disturbing reading.
By refusing to appoint Unterhalter, by any measure one of the great modern lawyers of our country (disclosure: I have known him for 40 years) the JSC completely ignored SCA deputy president Xola Petse’s plea for Unterhalter:
He ended his plea with a warning: “Within the confines of this room there is a crisis looming.”
Courtesy of Freedom Under Law, an NGO which compelled the release of this minute, this crisis warning is now public. And we now know that the ANC’s war on talent spreads beyond ports, electricity and municipalities right into the heart of our judiciary. However, in the case of the exclusion of Unterhalter, the JSC minutes also reveal what the recent shock polling results show: just how weak the ANC has become.
So, according to the JSC meeting minutes, it was EFF leader Julius Malema, who barely passed matric, but has advanced degrees in racism and a scholastic leaning toward fascism, who put the boot into Unterhalter.
Malema claimed that Unterhalter was guilty of “arrogance” and “subtle racism”. The Salem witch hunt could hardly improve on this finding of guilt. The vandalising of our constitutional architecture, when a constitutional delinquent like Malema becomes the loudest voice in the room selecting judges, is an even more dire indicator of the direction of travel going forward.
Even more curious in the redacted minutes is the utter silence of the DA – champion of the rule of law and merit-based appointments – on this defining matter.
Long before Unterhalter was excluded, in fact when he and I attended law school at Wits in the 1980s, the famous South African and British lawyer, Sir Sydney Kentridge – whom doubtless Malema would, too, have found guilty of “arrogance” – offered a prescient warning in a lecture there:
That’s a warning that has not aged, and it’s not confined to the judiciary. Just look all around you.
