Editorial
Johannesburg - This has been a tough week for President Cyril Ramaphosa, perhaps his toughest since he won the presidency of the ANC by a nail-bitingly thin margin at Nasrec in December 2017.
He has weathered many storms since then; a slow burning rebellion within his own party fomented by the secretary-general himself and then an out-and-out attempt at an insurrection which very nearly succeeded in plunging this country into an all-out civil war last July.
He also successfully navigated the greatest public health crisis in living memory, placing the country into an unprecedented lockdown. With his regular “family meetings”, he won the country’s trust. In our hour of greatest need, he stood tall.
And now? Through a combination of appeasement and “consensus” building within the fractured ruins of the once mighty ANC, he has steadily squandered the largesse he once enjoyed. He has equivocated when he should have acted with resolve, he has played his “long game” until the guilty actually felt they could behave with brazen impunity.
Until this week. All of a sudden Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane found herself suspended by the president. It’s not that she shouldn’t be; after all, courts at every level of our justice system have found her wholly unfit and incompetent to do her job. But the timing – and the alacrity – is deeply suspect.
Ramaphosa has been highly embarrassed this week by the reports of millions of dollars being stolen from the house on his game farm two years ago and the usual opportunistic politics of spectacle. There are many reasons why he should be embarrassed, all of them valid, but perhaps the biggest embarrassment is how the president has conducted himself in the wake of this scandal.
It is the single greatest irony that if Ramaphosa is to finally stumble and fall, it won’t be by anyone else’s doing but his own.