TOM EATON | Here’s Cyril’s chance to guard relief funds and change our jaded minds

My fellow columnists and I, somebody told me recently, keep getting Cyril Ramaphosa wrong.

This was not an unusual thing to be told. In our fact-free, anything-goes world, I am regularly accused of misrepresenting the truth, whether it be through my flagrant denials that the moon is hollow or my naive insistence that birds are real.

(I would suggest that you Google both of these conspiracy theories, but I know that at least one of you will topple in and never come out, so perhaps just take the word of your despondent correspondent that they exist and that far too many people believe them.)

The person telling me off this time, however, was a veteran activist and academic who has been far closer to the president than I have, and whose opinion and extensive experience I respect. This is someone who knows that the moon is solid and that birds are not CIA drones. And so I shut up and listened.

Speaking with quiet passion, he begged me, and the commentariat in general, to stop referring to Ramaphosa as spineless or cowardly. Certainly, he understood where such labels came from — explanations based on moral failings are more satisfying than analyses which involve complex and often contradictory political histories — but, he said, the truth was that Ramaphosa is neither spineless nor a coward but rather that he is “constrained”.

I asked how the president might become less constrained, and here my acquaintance returned to his activist roots. Ramaphosa’s critics in the middle class, he said, should join the ANC, marching by their hundreds of thousands into ANC branches around the country and giving the president a mightily strengthened mandate to pull the party in the direction they want it to go.

Ramaphosa’s critics in the middle class, he said, should join the ANC, marching by their hundreds of thousands into ANC branches around the country and giving the president a mightily strengthened mandate to pull the party in the direction they want it to go.

As I’ve said, my interlocutor is much more informed than I am, but I must confess that his remedy sounded about as useful as a doctor trying to cure a gangrenous patient by climbing inside said patient and wearing their dying body like a stinky tracksuit.

Worse, it failed to reckon with the corrupt — or at least fundamentally transactional — nature of the ANC: it might make sense if the ANC were a vaguely honest political party, but inviting yourself into a patronage network with nothing to offer but high-minded ideals (or, worse, a plan for dismantling the network) will get you isolated faster than a Bain whistle-blower and ignored harder than the step-aside rule.

I am more open to the idea that Ramaphosa is constrained rather than invertebrate, but this, too, isn’t a particularly helpful diagnosis. Constraint, after all, covers everything from a god-king deciding to listen to the temple virgin and postponing the mass murder of his family until a more auspicious week, right down to one of his subjects being sewn into a rawhide cocoon before being nailed into a snug wooden box and thrown into the sea as an offering to Ikea, the god of efficient storage.

Worth about half a billion dollars, Ramaphosa is clearly some way away from rawhide cocoons: he could easily wash his hands of our current mess and live out his remaining days in an endless Aegean summer.

Alas, having chosen to stay, he has seemed just as becalmed, drifting gently through a first term now four-fifths complete but which still seems to be where it was in its first few months, with its promises that things are about to happen, really, any time now.

At the weekend, however, I thought I felt a rumour of a breeze slip through the limp rigging of the good ship Cyril.

Admittedly, at first it didn’t feel much like progress. When a country’s finance minister announces that his own government can’t be trusted to handle disaster relief funds without stealing them, you’d be forgiven for believing that we’re holed below the waterline and going down by the stern.

Once the shock of the admission had landed, however, Enoch Godongwana’s revelation that he is looking for an independent agency to administer about R1bn in relief funds felt surprisingly healthy.

Once the shock of the admission had landed, however, Enoch Godongwana’s revelation that that he is looking for an independent agency to administer about R1bn in relief funds felt surprisingly healthy.

For some years I’ve been arguing that what we need in SA is sustainable corruption, whereby officials take moderate kickbacks — a sensible 10%, say — and then do their job, rather than flinging themselves face-first into the trough and then falling asleep once their tummies are full.

To reach this sunlit upland of public service and patriotism, however, certain realities need to be publicly acknowledged. You can’t informally formalise corruption, and thereby have a shot at keeping it in check, if you aren’t willing to be honest about who’s doing it.

At the weekend, a whole cabinet minister not only spoke of it openly, admitting that looting by “vultures” was more or less guaranteed in KwaZulu-Natal, but also implied that it was his own people — civil servants, most of whom are deployed ANC cadres, and their money-launderers in ANC-approved businesses — who would steal any cash left unguarded, even if it’s meant for compatriots whose lives have been destroyed.  

I am willing to accept that Ramaphosa is constrained rather than weak, but at some point he will have to be strong or else he will be removed and we will all be properly stuffed. Deliberately shielding public money from the grasping hands of his own party is dangerous, but it’s a start.

If only that start had come 30 years ago ...