There is little in politics more unseemly than a party in the throes of internal contestation for power. In SA, this is intensified by proportional representation, in in which our leaders are selected not by voters but by delegates at party conferences months before the general election.
In the DA the affliction was referred to as “electionitis”. Like an infectious disease, it would stalk the party immediately preceding party conferences and the compiling of electoral lists, when many would prioritise internal campaigning, back-stabbing and back-scratching over serving the electorate.
Ahead of the ANC’s elective conference in December, we should remember that for one faction of the party this particular contestation is a matter of life or death: one whose outcome will determine whether they spend the next chapter of their careers in jail.
As we await the Zondo commission’s final report, it’s clear things are getting pretty desperate for the radical economic transformation faction of the ANC.
The list of its members facing prosecution is growing so precipitously that some have moved straight from the provincial conference floor to the dock: from Bathabile Dlamini, Ace Magashule and Zandile Gumede to Carl Niehaus, whose court appearances have not prevented him from making his own show of laying charges against the president.
This is the reason they have set their sights on a political putsch in December — the most promising prospect for laying waste to the independent institutions of our criminal justice system, so as to avoid jail and continue the plunder of public resources so efficiently spearheaded by their spiritual leader, Jacob Zuma.
But the RET faction also has a Plan B: its members hope that the hoopla they can generate around #PhalaPhala will lead expedient opposition politicians, the media, political pundits and we the public to do their dirty work for them and hoist President Cyril Ramaphosa by his own petard.
The entire contrivance is so transparent as to be basically insulting: a theatrical exposé from Zuma’s liberator, Arthur Fraser, followed by a criminal charge as a cheap ploy to use the step-aside policy, championed by Ramaphosa himself, to remove him from the party leadership.
The plan is as dangerous as it is ambitious, given what we know about the president’s most proximate successors
This plan is as dangerous as it is ambitious, given what we know about who the president’s most proximate successors would be, and how quickly his stepping aside would catapult them into government. The ANC’s leadership bench is shallow and we would be foolish to nudge this narrative along on behalf of the RET faction by manufacturing enough outrage to keep it alive in the public discourse.
Of course, SA is not new to presidential scandals emanating from the auction of wildlife. When Ramaphosa was dubbed “The Buffalo” in 2012 it was because he had made light of bidding R18m for a buffalo..
Ramaphosa is perfectly entitled to spend his fortune however he chooses but the perception of profligacy by any political leader is a sensitive area for millions of South Africans.
The buffalo of 2012 should have been a warning about the choppy waters ahead.
But I am not so foolish as to do the RET’s dirty work, baying for the blood of Ramaphosa, whose efforts at restoring the independence of SA's criminal justice institutions will be the engine driving state capture prosecutions.
Nor will I consent to being played by individuals with no moral authority when their timing and objectives are deeply cynical and shameless.
It has been suggested that South Africans are quite capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time; that we can be seized by the questions surrounding #PhalaPhala and focus on pending state capture prosecutions.
This analysis misses the point: we are not being offered the opportunity to make dispassionate assessments of the ethics of two separate issues. As Ramaphosa takes one ANC provincial structure after the next ahead of the party’s December conference vote, we are being invited to aid the doyens of state capture in dispatching him well before that. This is an effort to manipulate the options ahead of the 2024 general election rather than engender a culture of openness and accountability.
And what else would it be, given that this entire ruse has been cooked up by the same characters who tried to sell our country to a foreign family?
Ramaphosa must come clean with the people of SA, the Reserve Bank and Sars, and put this undignified mess behind him before it becomes the running sore of his entire presidency. And then he must get back to making critical appointments — and dismissals — that will shore up SA’s investigating and prosecuting capacity under the leadership of principals who care nothing for the nasty internal politics of the ANC.
PODCAST | Is SA ripe to be captured... again?
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