TOM EATON | Now all of a sudden Ramaphosa trusts law enforcement?

In a startling about-turn, Cyril Ramaphosa has challenged Andre de Ruyter to take his allegations about criminal syndicates at Eskom to the authorities, suggesting the president has had a major change of heart since he decided not to report the Phala Phala theft to those same authorities.

Speaking to the press on Tuesday, Ramaphosa said that De Ruyter “should have trusted” South Africa’s crime-fighting institutions, “as do I”, marking a radical shift in the president’s position since he opted to say nothing about the money stolen from his game farm.

Ramaphosa didn’t offer any further information about how and when he had started trusting the authorities, but if he is telling the truth, it suggests the president has drifted even further out of touch with the lived experience of South Africans than was already revealed by his hallucinatory state of the nation address.

Indeed, on Tuesday it seemed Ramaphosa has now reached a point of such profound disassociation that he was simply saying words on the off chance that some of them mean something, insisting that De Ruyter should have taken his allegations to something called a “fusion centre”.

At first glance I assumed he had mistaken “fission” for “fusion” and was imagining a small room inside the Koeberg nuclear plant in which honest Eskom employees warm up their sausage rolls and dishonest ones burn paper trails that implicate cabinet ministers.

If I had accused an embedded, ANC-adjacent mafia of widespread corruption at Eskom ... and the minister in charge of my particular SOE had more or less brushed off my concerns, Ramaphosa’s law enforcement agencies would be literally the last place I would go.

It soon became clear, however, that Ramaphosa was talking about some sort of newly invented, hi-tech crime-fighting hub, a bit like the Avengers’ headquarters if Captain America kept renting our his shield to criminals, Thor kept kneecapping innocent bystanders with his hammer and Iron Man spent $100bn making a suit that couldn’t fly but could sometimes put a few bubbles in water like a very tired, second-hand SodaStream.

Ramaphosa, however, seems to have great faith in this set-up, telling the press that once a report of villainy “gets to the fusion centre there is just no way to escape accountability, and that is where [De Ruyter] should be going”.

Given how much accountability we’ve seen since the first revelations of state capture, I can only assume the infallible fusion centre either has only been used on very junior lieutenants, or doesn’t exist at all and is nothing more than one of the pretty fantasies Ramaphosa’s team murmurs in his ear as he sleeps at his desk, like smart cities and bullet trains.

What I know for sure, however, is that if I had accused an embedded, ANC-adjacent mafia of widespread corruption at Eskom, and believed that someone had tried to poison me at work, and the minister in charge of my particular SOE had more or less brushed off my concerns, Ramaphosa’s law enforcement agencies would be literally the last place I would go.

I know I’m not alone. A 2022 report by the Human Science Research Council showed that our trust in the police, specifically, had been at near-historic lows even before Bheki Cele’s bullies in blue started sjamboking citizens inside their own properties or turning water cannons on queues of pensioners during lockdown, and the police’s response (and in some cases, suspicious non-response) to the July 2021 insurrection was the final blow: today, only about a quarter of South Africans trust the police, while more than half believe “most” or “all” police officials are corrupt.

For Ramaphosa, however, the real problem isn’t the corruption, political bias or ineptitude of his law enforcement agencies, but rather what happens when we fail to take evidence to his imaginary super-sleuths. Then, he warned, we enter “a world of rumours and hearsay, and we start looking at each other with a great deal of suspicion”.

He’s partly right, of course, but luckily we don’t have to rely on rumours and hearsay to look at him and his party with a great deal of suspicion.

We can simply use our eyes and ears, and everything they — and Ramaphosa’s disgraced and disgraceful party — have shown us over the past fifteen years.