Five years after the euphoria of electing a supposedly competent, corruption-free Mandela ally as president of the African National Congress (ANC) to reset the party and the country, end corruption, and improve the efficiency of state enterprises and service delivery in general, there is now a feeling of déjà vu – that peculiar feeling of disappointment that all the hopes and enthusiasm were all misplaced.
Perhaps, Ramaphosa’s narrow win in 2017 – 2,440 to Dlamini-Zuma’s 2,261 and the failure of his allies to secure three of the six top positions in the ANC (which went to Zuma’s allies) should have given South Africans, investors, and anti-corruption crusaders a pause.
Perhaps, they should have seen that the ANC was not really interested in any fundamental reset but were only forced to elect Ramaphosa only to mollify an angry nation, investors and the international community and to improve the chances of the party heading into the 2019 general elections.
In fact, Ramaphosa’s victory was made possible in the first place by the last-minute switch of support by a strong Zuma ally and an alleged notoriously corrupt David Mabuza. Mr Mabuza was duly rewarded with the vice presidency of both the party and the country for his efforts.
Ramaphosa started tentatively but South Africans were urged to be patient. Five years on, nothing seems to have changed. Although there is a marginal improvement, corruption is still very rampant. Services and infrastructure continue to flounder, and the country is now adjusting to the phenomenon of load shedding, frequent electricity cuts, and the proliferation of portable electricity generators.
Unemployment is at a high of 35.5 percent while youth unemployment is getting closer to a world record of 60 percent. The crime rate has continued to soar; and with a crime index of 76.86, South Africa is ranked as the country with the third-highest crime rate in the world, ahead of countries like Afghanistan.
Unable to make a dent in the chronic youth unemployment epidemic, the government has virtually joined the narrative that outsiders are responsible for the problem, thus feeding the violent xenophobia that is becoming a part of South African life.
Worse, the once squeaky or relatively clean image of Ramaphosa is constantly being challenged by recent revelations.
The Justice Raymond Zondo commission, set up to inquire into corruption and state capture during the presidency of the notoriously corrupt Jacob Zuma, equally indicted Cyril Ramaphosa, who, as vice president, did nothing to prevent the massive corruption at the time even though he was aware of the practices.
Also, Ramaphosa is facing a criminal investigation after the country’s former head of intelligence, Authur Fraser revealed that the president failed to report the theft of about $4 million in cash, in his farmhouse in northern Limpopo province.
Ramaphosa was said to have stashed the money in his couch and under a mattress – and when the theft was discovered, he tried to cover up the crime and pay off the criminals. Ramaphosa did not deny the theft but said the money was “the proceeds from the sale of game”.
It is now becoming clear that the degeneration of the ANC was not just a Zuma phenomenon but deeply rooted. In an earlier article, I traced the problem of corruption in the ANC to the end of apartheid, in 1994, during the leadership of the venerable Nelson Mendela when it accepted the principle of black empowerment and subsequently adopted and codified the Black Economic Empowerment (BBE) policy in 2001.
At its core, the policy sought to use the powers of the newly captured state to direct intervention in the redistribution of assets and opportunities and deracialise the control of the economy or resolve the wide economic disparity created by apartheid policies that favoured only white business owners.
This is understandable since, at its base, the ANC is a nationalist movement whose main goal was the capture of state power and the pursuit of democracy.
The BEE essentially involves the transfer of state-owned enterprises (and these were huge, accounting for around 15% of GDP) on heavily discounted terms to black South Africans through privatization.
There was however a snag: the emergent black middle class lacked the capital to acquire these enterprises even at the discounted prices nor the expertise to run and manage them.
But how do they care? The National Democratic Revolution – the ideology behind the entire struggle against apartheid – requires the ANC to use state power to deracialise the economy.
While the black economic empowerment was rammed through, selling a few of the SOEs to blacks, the majority of the beneficiaries were ANC apparatchiks.
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However, that hasn’t stopped them from seeing all government parastatals, in the words of Roger Southall, a sociology professor at the University of Witwatersrand, as “sites of transformation”, effectively opening them up to wanton corruption and a legitimate means of wealth accumulation by all cadre of the ANC membership.
The revelations by the Zondo Commission bears this out. “Many of South Africa’s SOEs have been left on the verge of financial collapse because of tender fraud linked to ANC members who were deployed to senior positions”.
Of course, Zuma’s tenure epitomises the level of rot and decay in the ANC. Under him, the term “state capture” was added to the political lexicon of South Africa, describing a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state’s decision-making processes to their own advantage.
The recall of Jacob Zuma and the election of Cyril Ramaphosa in 2018 did not signal a repudiation of his policies or the corruption bazaar he superintended. It was rather a strategic reaction to mollify a clearly disenchanted electorate. With Mr Ramaphosa’s reputation in tatters, the Zuma faction within the party may stage a comeback.
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