Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - In 2018, the now ANC presidential hopeful and former Cabinet minister, Dr Zweli Mkhize, played a vital role in boosting Cyril Ramaphosa’s chances of securing a second term in Luthuli House and the Union Buildings.
He co-wrote a strategy that ensured Ramaphosa acted acutely aware of the strength of KwaZulu-Natal within the governing party and the country by keeping the province next to him by appointing nine ministers and three deputy ministers in his first Cabinet from the province.
Perhaps a compensation for the province’s failing, for the first time since 1991, to secure a position in the top six party leadership at Nasrec 2017.
Ramaphosa also embraced the KwaZulu-Natal leadership at the time by allowing chairperson Sihle Zikalala to take over the provincial premiership, even though Zikalala did not support him at Nasrec 2017 and he could have overlooked him by appointing a female premier.
Mkhize has changed his mind and is contesting instead of supporting Ramaphosa’s second-term bid. It had taken him three years into Ramaphosa’s term to discover what everyone already knew and what Ramaphosa had blatantly advertised all along: his dithering from taking tough political decisions and removing from political office corrupt individuals intent on sowing divisions.
Moreover, Mkhize should have spent the past 15 months in government championing the implementation of National Health Insurance, but resigned amid corruption investigations.
The president looks like he is toast, and almost every other story of his success has got lost in the noise – even the one about poor South Africans getting the R350 social grant until March 2024.
Ah well, the noise drowning the achievements of Ramaphosa’s first term in office also stems from the ANC’s systemic failure to lead as a collective and curb the wasteful expenditure repeatedly reported by the auditor-general as billions of rand tipped down the drain.
The end of this five-year ANC show looks disappointing: costly policies that splash about public money to favour an unending cannibalistic leadership contest.
Those vying for party leadership and ultimately controlling the public purse spent our taxes to prop up their electoral fortunes and reward the bank-rollers of various vote-buying schemes with lucrative contracts.
Even the carefully choreographed Special Investigating Unit’s probe of Mkhize’s involvement in awarding a communication tender worth R150 million to Digital Vibes during the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to his resignation as health minister, is yet another demonstration of the seriousness of the crisis.
It demonstrates that Ramaphosa and his wrecking crew have already smashed our democracy – and they have progressively turned the ire on themselves.
Those opportunistic ministers and bag carriers criticising Ramaphosa’s leadership in the run-up to this conference in the name of upholding party integrity and promoting membership unity have instead displayed only their lack of either quality.
They are, as jibed in one national radio breakfast show, “the vultures circling a tick-infested buffalo”.
Through their parasitic clinging to government positions while doing no service to the public, today, parents are worried about what they will feed their families as food prices continue rising.
Workers wonder if they will be jobless because of the crippling rolling electricity blackouts and widespread extortion of businesses by criminal syndicates.
School leavers are already in dread of a job-scarce economy and a bleak future that deprives them of their life progression into productive adulthood.
Meanwhile, despite being handed extra time in the previous general elections by trusting citizens, prominent cadres dominating the leadership contest have disgracefully spent the past few weeks and months not governing or steering the nation to prosperity, but plotting the right time to depose their leader, and whom they fancy as a replacement.
A vast tableau of national immiseration and slogans for radical economic transformation serves only as the backdrop to their squalid careerism.
It is no secret that all these self-serving leaders have done is depreciate the party’s value. The party’s electoral currency was once pure gold, and now it is the most debased metal in our fledgling democracy.
That is why ordinary South Africans who have at one point voted for the ANC to govern will enthusiastically celebrate the departure of many corrupt and incompetent individuals.
But the president, who has handed out plum jobs to identifiable individuals with questionable integrity and continued to retain them even after they were exposed, is by no means trustworthy enough to remove the party’s rot.
Ramaphosa’s shortcomings as ANC leader are the most prominent and severe symptoms of a deep crisis in our democracy. He is the leader of this mess, and trailing behind him is an entire wrecking crew of shameless leaders who have destroyed much, grabbed what they could and built nothing.
For all his faults, Ramaphosa is also paying the price for years of ANC rule infested by entitlement and greed.
Throughout the years, the corrupt have taken fistfuls and left only small change.
These people are bad at governing because they believe the government is for looting. Party renewal is a cute enabling slogan for them, but their real goal looks like self-advancement. And when they finally leave one looted office, their only punishment is a ludicrous diplomatic posting or their pick of state company directorships.
Seeing that some might retain political influence after the conference, we should justifiably insist that South Africa does not need a repackaged ANC management.
It is crying out for an entirely different form of governance that will invest power and wealth in those who have been deprived for decades.
South Africa deserves a radically devolved government free from political party dominance and incorporating a robust constituency system as part of a proportional representation of political choices.
It deserves an economic system that values the everyday needs of its people while actively shrinking the influence of the greedy, politically connected elite.
And it absolutely must get rid of this wrecking crew in their gravy train.
The end of an era of corrupt individuals clinging to party political power calls for celebrations, and, soon thereafter, the actual job of seeing the rest of them out of public office through the courts and our votes.
Nyembezi is a policy analyst and human rights activist
Cape Times