It was a solid attempt at distraction, but ending the mask mandate was never going to provide President Cyril Ramaphosa with a smokescreen big enough to hide chief justice Raymond Zondo’s damning indictment of his leadership, his cabinet and his utterly rotten party.
If only he could get the Guptas released and arrested all over again ...
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On Thursday, as the country began to digest Zondo’s vast catalogue of misrule and criminality, the ANC’s national executive committee called a hasty meeting. At the time of writing, the party hadn’t offered a reason for the gathering, but I suppose that when a country’s top judge has produced a 5,000-page report outlining in detail the extent to which you are pure trash, it makes sense to have a quick catch-up to map out a way forward, or at least a way to the nearest non-extradition country.
Zondo’s report is a towering achievement, not just for him and his team, but the country as a whole. I know that there’s many a slip twixt cup and putting the scumbags in jail, and many of Zondo’s recommendations are not accompanied by any practical suggestions for how to implement them. But it is still extraordinary to see a country’s top judge produce such a thorough and far-reaching indictment of that country’s ruling party, and then submit that report to a president condemned in its pages.
I am hugely grateful to Zondo, and Ramaphosa must take his medicine and deal with this latest stain on his legacy, a legacy which will no doubt be debated in the coming years. But with all due respect to Zondo — and a great deal of respect is due — I would humbly submit that one accusation levelled at the president is a little unfair.
With Ramaphosa removed from the picture in 2015 or 2016, we would now be three years into the first term of Zuma’s puppet, tonight hosting a banquet to celebrate the appointment of Duduzile Zuma as finance minister and Duduzane Zuma as energy minister, and the Zondo report sealed forever in a safe with no key …
According to the chief justice, Ramaphosa should have been bolder in his attempts to stop the rot, with his less confrontational “strategic” manoeuvres doing virtually nothing to drag the country away from the wreckers.
Admittedly, I was part of the chorus of critics yelling the same thing in the mid-2010s. Ramaphosa, after all, was part of the cabal that quashed multiple motions of no confidence in Zuma and openly voted that the former president keep his Nkandla loot.
What we didn’t understand then, however, was how tenuous Ramaphosa’s position was, and the extent to which performative unity trumps the rule of law in the ANC.
Zondo is a judge, and his relationship with the law must be rigid and resolute, not allowing room for slippery moral compromises or slimy pragmatism. From a legal and moral perspective, he is entirely right to condemn Ramaphosa’s inaction.
Zuma, however, was not working from a legal or moral perspective, and I can’t help wondering where we would be right now had Zondo got his way and seen Ramaphosa stand up against the Zupta cabal.
Certainly, it seems extremely unlikely Ramaphosa would have made it as far as Nasrec, let alone beat Zuma in those fraught final hours.
With Ramaphosa removed from the picture in 2015 or 2016, we would now be three years into the first term of Zuma’s puppet, tonight hosting a banquet to celebrate the appointment of Duduzile Zuma as finance minister and Duduzane Zuma as energy minister, and the Zondo report sealed forever in a safe with no key ...
It is absolutely true that Ramaphosa should have done much more. It is also absolutely true that we’d be infinitely worse off if he had.
Ah, the paradoxes that this goddam organisation keeps throwing at us ...
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