Tuesday was probably the worst day of Cyril Ramaphosa’s six-month-old presidency, with news coming through that the economy he thought he had been fixing all along was in fact in much worse shape than anyone thought it was.
But leaving Beijing in a huff – like he did in April while attending the Commonwealth Heads of State Summit after a small section of the 250,000 population of Mahikeng took to the streets – was not on his mind this week.
It was “not a full-blown recession”, he retorted, choosing to stay put at the Forum on China Africa Trade Cooperation (Focac) where, judging from the pictures, he had a permanent seat next to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.
Focusing on his more important task, which was to “refute the view that a new colonialism is taking hold in Africa, as our detractors would have us believe”, his government’s reaction to the worst crisis in years was then left to his finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, whose advice simply was: “Don’t panic”. Huh!
The next day a clearly panic-stricken ANC, “concerned” about the impact the recession will have on the party’s election prospects next year, called a media briefing.
ANC economic transformation tsar Enoch Godongwana wanted to “raise our concern about the employment implications of weak growth”, saying the challenges required a coherent and multi-faceted response.
Later that day, when I pointed to the absurdity of an ANC committee “calling” on its own officials in government to do something, his rather disingenuous answer was: “We can’t cross the line between the party and the state”.
Just minutes before, ANC Gauteng chairman and premier David Makhura had been live on television, having dropped everything he was doing to address an impromptu briefing following the death of three firefighters at a government building that caught fire earlier that day.
By Makhura and his infrastructure MEC, Jacob Mamabolo’s, own admission, the building was not compliant with health and safety regulations, and this the provincial government knew long before this week’s tragic incident.
Makhura’s insistence that no one should pass judgment before knowing the cause of the fire, and that the government had already started moving its employees from the uninhabitable building to others, was a poorly disguised attempt at covering up something that could have been prevented – that three dedicated firemen died trying to save the lives of government workers who were not supposed to be in that building in the first place.
Not too long before he died, I sat with Govan Mbeki in his Summerstrand home.
During our interview – in between pregnant pauses where at times it felt like he was sleeping midway through his sentences – the still sharpminded Rivonia trialist could still pull a smile and brag about the organisation to which he dedicated almost his entire life, because it stood “for the greatest of all things of this world”.
Sadly, no one can claim that about today’s ANC, and the irony about the five men who this week became the face of both the party and its government’s response to two very serious crises is that all of them are leading lights of the “thuma mina” brigade – supposedly leading the charge by the party faithful, in their new-found attempts to rediscover the movement’s purpose and restore its glory.
It’s also unlikely Ramaphosa would abruptly fire Nene like Zuma did in 2015, shaving off more than 30% of the rand’s value and thereby devaluing poor workers’ investments – all for the finance minister’s refusal to sign a nuclear deal and for resisting Treasury’s capture.
We may no longer have a giggling fellow who embarrassed us at every turn, who never hid the fact that he didn’t care, but that however doesn’t mean that Jacob Zuma’s successor, Ramaphosa, does what needs to be done, or does it timeously.
Godongwana was one of the first people to publicly state that Zuma was a liability and should go.
But he too knows very well, and admitted as much on Wednesday, that the ANC problems didn’t start with Zuma, but years before, when dithering and bickering within the ANC and its allies also played a role.
As new leaders positioned themselves, power mongering and greed meant that even the better of the lot have to condone or pretend to be helpless, just to be elected or kept in their positions, even when morally repugnant decisions were taken by members and supporters.
The expedience on the land question is proof of that.
And how else does one explain the Nelson Mandela Bay regional ANC’s decision to appoint Andile Lungisa to critical positions, or the Gauteng province electing Qedani Mahlangu to its provincial executive just after the Esidimeni saga?
The problem is that Ramaphosa, Makhura et al believe that they can’t do worse than the worst of the bunch. And they are probably right. But we are not looking for people who can do better than the worst.
We don’t have the luxury to wait for “full-blown” poverty. And panic we must.
SA Inc deserves better, much better than these leaders are prepared to give us right now.
Vuyo Mvoko is a journalist and broadcast news anchor.