'An event has happened upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent," said Edmund Burke in May 1789. His words, about an impeachment that was about to get under way, are as relevant today as they were then.
In politics, as in life, there are events or developments that force us to pause and ponder the magnitude of the shifts we see unfolding before us, redefining our understanding of our lived and ultimate reality.
While Burke's words relate to a totally different context, they seem most apt in the aftermath of the riots, or attempted coup, that left the nation's multibillion-rand assets in ruins, and more than 330 lives lost.
The president and his security chiefs ought correctly to bring evidence showing that these dramatic events were nothing short of, in his words, a "well-co-ordinated" attempt to "dislodge the democratic state".
But more than a week later, the response by the country's security ministers has been a source of comical relief, if not caustic embarrassment. Defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula seemed rather irritated when she dismissed talk of an insurgency, saying "there is no evidence for this".
While she recanted her words, the National Prosecuting Authority has now said no-one has yet been charged for crimes against the state. The battles between the police and state security ministers, Bheki Cele and Ayanda Dlodlo, accusing each other of lying publicly, are also not merely unseemly, or repeated errors of judgment - they talk to deeper issues of the fragility of our security.
There was a time not long ago when cabinet reshuffles were in vogue, with some happening in the middle of the night. South Africans grew weary of these, and the commission investigating state capture has amply demonstrated the bad faith behind many of them. Since he became president, Ramaphosa has sought to demonstrate that we are in a new era.
But there has never been a more opportune time for society to collectively ask its president to reshuffle his cabinet than now. Allow me a brief digression. A source said this week that the more the media tells Ramaphosa to reshuffle his cabinet, the more determined to not do so he becomes.
Ours must be to politely remind the president that the legitimacy of the state has its genesis in a social contract between those who govern and the governed. This dictates that the people lose their natural liberty, according to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and this helps avoid "society degenerating into a state of nature" characterised by "war of all against all", according to Thomas Hobbes, which state we almost saw in Phoenix, north of Durban.
If Ramaphosa removes all remnants of the so-called RET forces from his cabinet, they become free of government responsibility to mount a challenge within the party
The question therefore is whether the embarrassing security situation constitutes errors that, in a nascent democracy, must not only be accepted but ought rightly to have been anticipated.
In the book, Enlightenment Aberrations, David W Bates notes: "Looked at from the perspective of error and truth, the Romantic insight, Hegelian dialectic, positivist sociology, laissez-faire political economy, Darwinian evolutionary biology, statistical analysis, Marxist economics, all were systemic ways of, if not eliminating error and aberration from the world, at least reducing it (epistemologically) to mere appearance."
In other words, some errors in 2021 are so banal they make no sense of much of the work by thinkers of yore. It means Ramaphosa, entrusted by the nation to ensure our collective wellbeing, has a higher duty to eliminate error and aberration from our world, or at least reduce it to mere appearance.
More directly, where cabinet ministers conduct themselves in ways that seem at odds with our national goal, Ramaphosa has a duty to relieve them of the responsibilities to lead. But this is a difficult thing about which to write, as Burke counselled, because no president wants to be told who to hire and fire, much less when.
But Burke is correct that it is, in the wake of an insurrection and unseemly fissures by ministers, "impossible to be silent". If anything, silence makes all of us complicit in the mismanagement of our affairs.
In the circumstances, how should a president be told to fire his cabinet ministers without irritating him into inaction?
Does proceeding as if nothing major has happened create an impression that the error and aberration, of which Bates wrote, is, in fact, Ramaphosa? The point, again, is not to tell the president what to do, for he employs advisers for this, but to raise strongly though gently an issue about action required of him in terms of the social contract he has with us all.
Part of the reason this reshuffle is overdue is because some of the busiest ministers are in acting positions. Take acting minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, whose substantive post is the portfolio of small business but is on our screens daily in the position previously held by the late Jackson Mthembu.
While Ntshavheni has become a normal feature of government communication, ably and increasingly confidently articulating the government's position on a range of issues, including the recent riots, we must wonder how much pain the small business portfolio is taking.
There is also Mmamoloko Kubayi, the acting health minister whose substantive post is tourism. The health portfolio easily makes her the busiest cabinet member.
While these two ministers might be great in their acting posts, are they applying themselves with equal measure to their substantive posts? Further, if they are possessed of the energy to run two departments without there being a problem, isn't that a case for a reduction in cabinet posts? Either way, the current situation is evidently unsustainable and constitutes grounds to ask the president to do his part of the social contract.
For all intents and purposes, the RET forces seem defeated and weak. The imprisonment of Zuma, their father figure, and the transient though devastating nature of the riots, tell an interesting story about what is left of the faction
If Ramaphosa removes all remnants of the so-called RET forces from his cabinet, they become free of government responsibility to mount a challenge within the party. Alternatively, they have all the time to set up a party to challenge the ANC, a move that could backfire.
For all intents and purposes, the RET forces seem defeated and weak. The imprisonment of Zuma, their father figure, and the transient though devastating nature of the riots, tell an interesting story about what is left of the faction. That many of them remained silent as Zuma spent his first night in jail is indicative of how sobering this moment is for them. That said, this moment in history requires Ramaphosa to up a gear in his consolidation of his power by appointing a few more of his young but popular ministers to key positions.
While South Africans are indubitably forgiving people, they can see a cabinet that does not cohere from a distance.
From the ruins of last week's looting and violent conflicts, Ramaphosa must show that he takes his contract with "fellow South Africans" seriously enough to gift them a renewed top tier of governance that is alive to their historical mission. To say this is not to tell him what to do, for he knows that, but to remind him of his contract with all of us.
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