As the relentlessly rising petrol price continues to deliver radical economic transformation to SA, fans of Jacob Zuma keep insisting Cyril Ramaphosa is to blame. And in a funny sort of way, they’re not wrong.
Of course, none of them is making the obvious argument. On the contrary, most of what I’ve heard and read boils down to a claim that Zuma was a better president than Ramaphosa — and should still be in power — because petrol was way cheaper during his administration.
I don’t need to point out the inherent flaw in this approach. After all, once you start ranking presidents based on the petrol price, you have to acknowledge that, while petrol certainly was cheaper under Zuma than Ramaphosa, it was also cheaper under Thabo Mbeki than under Zuma, cheaper under Nelson Mandela than under Mbeki, cheaper under FW de Klerk than under Mandela, cheaper under PW Botha than under De Klerk, and so on and so on until there comes a point where you must, using this logic, insist that Hendrik Verwoerd was a far better president than Nelson Mandela.
Cherry-picking facts to back up your feelings is nothing new in political squabbles, but I’ve been impressed by the almost Stalin-like ability of Zuma’s backers to delete entire fields of human knowledge that don’t support their threadbare arguments.
For instance, I keep reading that Zuma managed to keep the petrol price in check despite the oil price regularly surging above $100 a barrel during his administration, something Ramaphosa has failed hopelessly to emulate.
On the surface this is true. According to the website of the department of minerals and energy, there were 42 months in Zuma’s presidency in which the average oil price was more than $100, whereas Ramaphosa has endured just two such months.
What Zuma’s fans refuse to acknowledge, however, is the emaciated elephant in the room: the relentlessly shrinking rand. During those 42 months in the Zuma era, it bounced around between R6.88 and R11 to the dollar; in the last two, it has averaged about R15.
In fact, so drastic has been the rand’s fall that I find it slightly strange that Zuma’s backers haven’t seized on it to make their case even more loudly. Then again, if you genuinely believe that Jacob Zuma was a good president, and believe he should still be anywhere near the levers of power, I suppose it’s a pretty safe bet that, like him, you don’t really know how money works, and should probably avoid arguments that involve numbers.
So how, I hear you asking, is all of this Ramaphosa’s fault? Surely it is extremely unfair, not to say ignorant, to try to blame him for the rand’s fall over the past 50 years and the current spasms in the oil price?
You’re right, of course. It would be silly to try to pin all that on one man. But Ramaphosa, as he and his colleagues have endlessly pointed out, is both one man and many. In the church of the ANC, the president is the political Holy Spirit, which is also the Party, which is the membership, which is embodied by the president. It’s all one Gordian knot of culpability, a mouldy tangle in which the same names get endlessly recycled from one administration to the next.
Zuma was, of course, the wrecker-in-chief, but his time in office also showed us that a relatively strong rand (or at least one that doesn’t yet show signs of the rot) can offer some protection from the worst energy shocks. In those 42 months, the basic fuel price never rose above 851c a litre. Ramaphosa, experiencing a similar oil price but saddled with a worthless rand, has watched the basic fuel price surge to well above 1,200c a litre.
Yes, the rand has been shrinking for half a century: many readers will remember when it was stronger than the British pound. And yes, that collapse isn’t only the fault of the ANC.
But during Zuma’s nine wasted years, and Ramaphosa’s four paralysed ones, we’ve watched the ANC do everything in its power to tear down the rand and the modest protection it offers us against the economic storms that blow in from the wider world.
And now here we are, facing the same storm that’s sweeping the globe, but finding that our umbrella has disintegrated and our raincoat has been stolen by a hustler from Uttar Pradesh, wondering how different it all might have been if Ramaphosa or Zuma or Mbeki had had to pay for their own petrol at any point in the past 20 years ...
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