PETER BRUCE | Cyril finally has to account, and it’s about time

As they say in Afrikaans, nou gaan die k*k spat. The Constitutional Court judgment on Friday ordered parliament to refer the findings of a 2022 panel, constituted by parliament itself and then voted away by the ANC majority that existed at the time, to an impeachment committee that could result in President Cyril Ramaphosa being forced out of office.

In 2022, Arthur Fraser, who had been former president Jacob Zuma’s head of intelligence, reported that $4m (about R65m) had been stolen from inside a sofa at Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala game ranch in Limpopo. Ramaphosa claimed it was $580,000, a deposit from a Sudanese businessman keen to buy some of the disease-free buffalo bred on the ranch.

Parliament appointed a three-person judicial panel to investigate. It found there was prima facia evidence Ramaphosa had breached the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act.

Faced with this, the ANC used its majority at the time to vote against establishing a committee to investigate Ramaphosa’s possible impeachment. It so traumatised Ramaphosa he told close associates he wanted to resign.

The court judgment on Friday is sweet revenge for Zuma for the way Ramaphosa ousted him in 2018.

The EFF took the vote to the Constitutional Court and won a famous victory on Friday.

The way forward for the country is completely unclear. The ANC no longer has a majority, and there’s a real possibility Ramaphosa could now fall, taking the fragile but still-standing GNU with him.

It’s not a given. The original panel report was weak. Its leader, former chief justice Sandile Ncgobo, was a Zuma favourite. And there was little actual evidence in its report that what Ramaphosa had done was technically corrupt. Both the South African Revenue Service and the Reserve Bank cleared him of wrongdoing and the impeachment committee will have to take those calls into account.

But money in the sofa was spectacularly foolish. As a sitting president, for a start, he should not have been running a business.

And his penchant for secrecy was bound to hurt him. Just last weekend he was in Zimbabwe for a “private” meeting with President Emmerson Mnangagwa at his farm. Mnangagwa brought along two dubious friends, one of whom is wanted in South Africa. Ramaphosa’s office says he didn’t know the men, but we still have no idea why he went, what was discussed, how he got there, or who paid for his trip.

The court order on Friday is sweet revenge for Zuma for the way Ramaphosa ousted him in 2018, but this time we are all potential victims. Depending on how long parliament’s impeachment committee takes to do its work, and even if it does find against him, it would still take a two-thirds majority vote in parliament to remove Ramaphosa.

While the politics are Byzantine, that’s not impossible. Many ANC MPs would have to support impeachment but many smaller parties would not. But if the impeachment committee does find against him, it would be almost suicidal for any centrist party to support him. The DA would irreparably wound itself if the evidence of wrongdoing was clear. Abstention would not do. And so the GNU would fall. The EFF would vote to impeach. So would Zuma’s MK Party.

The DA would be in an unbearable position. The president is elected by parliament, but the DA could simply not support Deputy President Paul Mashatile, the front runner to replace Ramaphosa as ANC leader in December 2027 but widely regarded as having used his offices to enrich himself. Both the EFF and MKP probably would. As president, Mashatile would then reconstitute the GNU, bringing in ministers from both the EFF and the MKP.

The DA could conceivably support an alternative ANC candidate like electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, but it is hard to see the ANC going down that route, and he doesn’t control a faction in the party.

The DA’s dilemma is the economic consequences. Some of Ramaphosa’s reforms are set in stone — the private supply of electricity being the most obvious. But wider reforms in freight logistics, especially rail, water and local government, proceed at snail’s pace and could effortlessly be reversed by a more left-wing administration.

Added to that, the effects of US President Donald Trump’s preposterous war on Iran already promise a world of pain for this country, making debt, inflation and investment targets highly tenuous.

The ANC, of course, also has to tread carefully. A poor choice of replacement for Ramaphosa, if it comes to that, could be electorally ruinous.

The sad fact, though, is that the period of deep political and economic uncertainty into which we are headed is all the fault of just one man — a president whose predilection for privacy and refusal to account, ever, to the public have made him an easy target.

He may well survive but he will now finally be properly and publicly cross-examined over and over. And it is about time.