Leadership and courage are the only way President Cyril Ramaphosa gets out from under the pressure of his opponents inside the ANC in North West, KwaZulu-Natal and elsewhere. He has to put his head down and do the right thing. People are not stupid. They know a thief when they see one. We all know the calibre of the people trying to destabilise the country in the post-Zuma era.
You can easily be distracted by fashion and trends that mask essential truths. Why, for instance, are poverty and inequality almost always mentioned in the same sentence as if they were the same thing? A real leader would have sorted that out long ago. If you had the choice, now, to fix either poverty or inequality in South Africa, which would you choose? You can't do both. They have different causes and, therefore, must have different solutions.
Inequality is caused by the presence of wealth. Poverty is caused by its complete absence. And you surely, surely, fix poverty first.
Ramaphosa would instinctively know this but he is surrounded by leftist allies and forces whose instinct would be to fix inequality first. That's why Zwelinzima Vavi took his new South African Federation of Trade Unions onto the streets on Wednesday. It's why the land issue has become such a popular rallying point despite persistent failures of restitution on the ground.
Poor people can only be helped by governments that are focused and disciplined in the extreme. It is very hard work. They need hospitals that actually heal them, schools that actually equip them with real knowledge and skills. They need obsessive bureaucracies that serve them quickly, efficiently and with respect.More than anything, poor people need to know they belong in a society that wants to lift them out of poverty. You end poverty in South Africa and you fix everything. It doesn't mean the end of inequality. But it means the end of our greatest curse - indignity. It's the one thing Julius Malema gets right all the time.
And it is why Ramaphosa was absolutely right to place the health department of North West under central government administration on Thursday and supplant the North West provincial treasury's oversight of it and its procurement. It means, for a start, that the Zuma-Gupta acolyte who runs the province as its premier, Supra Mahumapelo, won't be dishing out juicy hospital contracts in the Platinum Belt anytime soon. If ever again. When a similar fate befell Cassel Mathale, premier of Limpopo, in 2011, it was the end of him.
A ring of due process is now slowly closing around Mahumapelo. It cannot be stopped. He has given away money that might have helped the poor to Jacob Zuma. It is theft, the opposite of what he is supposed to do. He cannot be trusted with public funds. Deliciously, a state investigation of what has gone wrong in North West will be led by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Her reputation is, thankfully, finally on the line.
There has been a lot of anxious commentary about the bind people like Mahumapelo have put Ramaphosa in. He was also jeered in KwaZulu-Natal the other day. But perhaps we are too easily spooked. The threat to Ramaphosa is in the party, in a divided ANC. But even while the ANC is divided it is worth remembering that the majority of the division is with him, not the Zuma faction.
The Zuma faction makes a lot of noise and is good at working political journalists but they are gradually losing ground. There might be some Gupta money still paying for disruption and trials and ceremonies but it will be tracked down and frozen. There will soon be no point to Zuma.But Ramaphosa doesn't have to fight on divided territory alone. He runs the government, and the constitution gives him enormous power to act responsibly and with discipline to ensure the state serves the poor. He wrote the constitution and knows his powers. They're substantial. That is what he used in shoving aside Mahumapelo's treasury on Thursday. There'll be no more health tenders to Supra's friends.
At least for a while. We ordinary folk are just going to have to get used to a little uncertainty. For my part I think the Zuma crowd will gradually fade away. Whether that means Ramaphosa succeeds is another question. Events can change anything but, as things stand, the ANC, even if divided, will comfortably win the election next year. The EFF will struggle to double its vote (to 12%) and the DA will battle to hold its ground.
That's politics. You behave badly and you get punished. You behave with some semblance of integrity, as Ramaphosa did to Mahumapelo on Thursday, and you get to fight another day...