MAKHUDU SEFARA | It turns out Ramaphosa and Zuma are cut from the same cloth

In the book The Bush Tragedy — The Unmaking of a President, Jacob Weisberg talks about “the confidence that allows us to accept our limitations, admit our mistakes, and improve what we can in the time that remains” on this scorched Earth. 

He says this in the context of his comparison of how George W Bush related to his father George Bush snr and how Winston Churchill related to his father Lord Randolph Churchill. “The struggle with low expectation, the early failures, the burden of dynasty, the coping through alcohol — these are all themes of Churchill’s biography as well as Bush’s,” he writes.

Bush jnr, says Weisberg, trained himself “to be hasty, extreme and unbending” to counter perceptions that he could be like his “thoughtful, moderate and pragmatic father”. 

When the historical moment arrived, these traits unleashed the tragedy of the lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and havoc in the world. 

What, meanwhile, was required from Bush jnr was simply the confidence to extricate himself from the shadow of his father by being himself, not trying too hard to be his opposite, just as President Cyril Ramaphosa has tried to convince us that he is not like that other crooked former president with a sizeable fire pool. 

Zuma may not be Ramaphosa’s father but, through his actions, it is clear Ramaphosa had set out to be unlike Zuma. And who can blame him? Zuma arguably led the most corrupt government since the dawn of our democracy. Ramaphosa would have been correct to not emulate anything from the Zuma years. But, we learn from Weisberg, the point is not so much trying to distinguish yourself, as it is about having the confidence to just be you, warts and all, and improve what you can, before you kick that bucket or go to jail.

Now the onset of the Phala Phala scandal means, at this point, that Nkandla and the now infamous farm in Limpopo are two sides of the same coin. 

Ramaphosa has placed all of us — his supporters, opponents and curious townspeople — in an invidious position. He has singularly discredited the fight against corruption and malfeasance.

In Bush’s case, his unnecessary attempt to appear different to his father created a global scandal and narrative of failure, with which he will be associated long after he has passed on. In Ramaphosa’s case it has unleashed horror among his ardent supporters that our first citizen is, after all, not much different to his much-despised predecessor. 

When the opposition parties and some in the ANC say he must go, the supporters don’t know whether history will judge them harshly for defending a president who, on the face of it, not only violated his oath of office, but, like Bush at the height of his Iraq scandal, tried to stay put when the time was up.

Ramaphosa has placed all of us — his supporters, opponents and curious townspeople — in an invidious position. He has singularly discredited the fight against corruption and malfeasance. He has gnawed at the legitimacy of his administration. How does he tell public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan that he is messing up our country with these stage 6 blackouts? When Gordhan says the issue is with generation, how does Ramaphosa reprimand energy minister Gwede Mantashe, fingered in the state capture report, but who is his chief defender in the Phala Phala saga? 

It’s a hot mess. It’s got to remind us of Rene Descartes’s words: “They who set themselves to give precepts must of course regard themselves as possessed of greater skill than those to whom they prescribe; and if they err in the slightest particular, they subject themselves to censure.”

It is Ramaphosa who has created more commissions of inquiry than any other president since 1994, forcing those implicated to speak, to explain themselves and then face censure. But not him. If the police can’t prove beyond reasonable doubt that he has a case to answer, he won’t even give us a broad explanation about what happened at Phala Phala. Descartes’s censure is not for him. 

That censure, say the EFF and many others, is that Ramaphosa must simply go. He has brought dishonour to the presidency. The EFF has sponsored a motion of no confidence to boot. For this to succeed, the EFF needs ANC MPs to defy their party and risk their careers. Put differently, the EFF needs ANC MPs it calls thieves to put the country first. Truth is, it’s not going to happen. We can criticise him — and lord, he, in the bowels of his heart, knows he deserves all the criticism — but this will not shame him into retiring to Phala Phala.

Instead, he will saunter into boardrooms, wave at people who don’t know about his mattresses and couches, pose for pictures at the G7 summit in Schloss Elmau, Germany, or even proceed to Botswana afterwards as if to buy time. Who can blame him? The poor guy (also known as the mattress king) is happy to get a reprieve. Not many reporters are interested in his mattress at the G7. 

The truth is that even his supporters are unsettled that the guy they believed was the high priest of the rule of law, constitutionalism and accountability representing them in Germany could be responsible for things they abhor.

His insistence on his right to silence has shattered the hopes of those who said that after the many years of wanton thieving and impunity, Ramaphosa represented a new hope. When they see him unable to explain, even in broad terms, what on Earth happened at Phala Phala, it was like a stab in the back. An et tu Brute type moment. 

Without an explanation, who is brave enough to stand before the nation and say our leader is a man of integrity, one whose bank is not mattresses and couches, one who knew absolutely nothing about the alleged torturing of his helper and her Namibian connects? Or that the subsequent payments/bribes to these for their silence were not financed by his excellency? 

The unmaking of this president, to use Weisberg’s words, is the shock discovery that all this time he has been trying not to be like Zuma he was, in fact, just like him. At least Zuma, like Bush and Churchill, suffered “low expectation, (and) early failures”. What Ramaphosa needs is “the confidence that allows (him) to accept (his) limitations, admit (his) mistakes, and improve what (he) can in the time that remains” on this scorched Earth.