It was oddly fitting that this column was written several hours after deadline on Thursday evening without knowing whether Cyril Ramaphosa would resign: most of his presidency has involved South Africans rearranging their lives around ANC crises and waiting in the dark to see whether things are bad or worse.
What made Thursday different, however, was the speed with which the whole thing seemed to be unravelling.
Mid-afternoon rumours of evening television addresses are not new to us. Even political bombshells no longer shock us. But always, the late-night addresses and the damning revelations have been followed by some spokesperson telling us that the politicians involved will apply their minds to the revelation, and brief the media next week on how they plan to discuss ways to start discussing strategies for taking the revelations under advisement.
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On Thursday, we went from reading the key findings of the section 89 report to hearing that Ramaphosa was in deep trouble to hearing he might be about to resign to hearing that he might not be about to resign, all in under 12 hours.
At the time of writing, two hours after a rumoured 8pm “family meeting” hadn’t materialised, the frantic subtext of the quotes and reports coming out of the Ramaphosa camp seemed to have calmed down, with spokesperson Vincent Magwenya assuring the media that the president was neither panicking nor lacking “confidence in his own caucus”.
To me, this confirmed that Ramaphosa was in fact panicking and had no confidence in his own caucus; but at the very least, the silence from the president himself suggested his team had managed to wrestle him to the ground, drag the pen out of his hand and kick the unsigned resignation out of his reach.
To me, this confirmed that Ramaphosa was, in fact panicking and had no confidence in his own caucus; but at the very least, the silence from the president himself suggested that his team had managed to wrestle him to the ground, drag the pen out of his hand, and kick the unsigned resignation out of his reach.
No doubt the details of Thursday will slowly be pieced together in the coming days, or else revealed in some tell-all book, 10 years hence. It’s also impossible to form an accurate chronology using news reports, many of which would have been based on educated guesses or high-quality rumours from contacts close to the NEC.
Still, the general sequence of events suggested by the media on Thursday was that Ramaphosa had been holed below the waterline, had understood that he was done, was going to fall on his sword, was going to tell the country about his sword-falling plans, and was finally convinced at least to sleep on it and see if the new dawn (sigh) brought fresh resolve and reinforcements.
Amid all of this will-he-or-won’t he speculation, however, one question remained largely unexamined: why would he? Why would Ramaphosa struggle on?
Spokesperson Magwenya wasn’t committing either way. On Thursday evening, he admitted that “all options are on the table”, but, he added, whatever decision Ramaphosa took, it would not be in his own interests but rather the best interests of the country.
I’m not in the habit of believing political spin-doctors, but I think in this case Magwenya was telling the truth, albeit accidentally.
I believe Ramaphosa will put country above self in this case.
He won’t do it because he’s brave or noble or patriotic.
He’ll do it because he’s so rich that material consequences don’t exist for him, at least not on the same level as they do for you, me or indeed any of his colleagues in the ANC.
Jacob Zuma is a few bad bets away from being Carl Niehaus, and Carl Niehaus is one bounced cheque away from having to get a real job. Men like Zuma and Niehaus, and all the other ANC takers, live terrifyingly close to material discomfort, perhaps even, if things go very badly, poverty. You only need to watch “I Blew It” to know how easy it is to spend a million bucks.
Jacob Zuma is a few bad bets away from being Carl Niehaus, and Carl Niehaus is one bounced cheque away from having to get a real job.
Spending a billion bucks, however, is much, much harder. And when you’re worth between R6bn and R8bn, it’s almost impossible, at least if you live in SA: Ramaphosa could put his fortune in an ordinary bank account, earning a mediocre 5% interest, and still be making about R1m a day, simply by breathing in and out.
Yes, he can still be stressed, or angry, or anxious, or disappointed. He can still get sick. He can die, like the rest of us. But Ramaphosa can’t fail in a way that materially changes the quality of the rest of his life. If he decides to fight on, you could argue, it will be in service of his vision of how the ANC and the country should look.
Perhaps that’s vanity. Perhaps it’s idealism. I don’t know. But I suspect none of us can really understand what Ramaphosa is thinking or feeling right now, because we live in a world in which money is chased rather than simply piled up in unfathomably large denominations, and in which failure results in personal crisis, not simply drifting away from the office where you cosplayed Mr President towards ... well, where do billionaires go when they retire?
Perhaps we’re about to find out.
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