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“Don’t you have a couch full of cash? Don’t worry, you can read on for free,” read the ad on the website of the ‘Daily Maverick’, a tough and sometimes very funny South African news site. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cash-stuffed sofa has become a powerful and universally recognized meme, but it hasn’t brought him down yet.
Ramaphosa was Mr. Clean, he was thought to be so rich that he would not need to steal. The job he sought and got in 2017 was to overthrow South Africa’s previous president, Jacob Zuma, and clean up corruption.
Zuma and his cronies were spectacularly corrupt, turning the government machine into an ATM for themselves in an operation known as ‘state capture’. Even the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which led the liberation struggle and has been in power ever since, knew it had gone too far. They voted out of Zuma and into Ramaphosa.
Once in office, he did move against some corrupt individuals, but there certainly wasn’t the kind of decisive cleansing of the party that his supporters had hoped for. Zuma’s faction, based primarily in the Zulu-majority province of KwaZulu Natal, continued to hold high office and influence policy, and five years later, Ramaphosa is seen by many as a disappointment.
A disappointment, but at least not a crook, which is why, for lack of a better candidate, he was still considered a candidate for re-election as ANC president later this year, which would automatically make him the candidate of the ANC for the presidency of the entire country again in the 2024 national elections.
But then there was the matter of the overstuffed sofa. Last June, a crony of Zuma’s reported a theft in court: a theft of between $400,000 and $4 million that had been placed on the back of a sofa at the Ramaphosa game farm in northern South Africa.
Ramaphosa did not report the theft, as he was legally required to do. Instead, he sent his head bodyguard to Namibia to retrieve the stolen money and said nothing about it. He might not have been the product of corruption, but at least he was hiding money that he should have declared and paid taxes.
No longer Mr. Clean, however, Ramaphosa was re-elected as party leader and 2024 presidential candidate at the ANC’s national conference last weekend, mainly because they had no more plausible candidate. But it was close: Ramaphosa got 2,476 votes, and pro-corruption, pro-Zuma candidate Zweli Mkhize got 1,897.
How did it come to this? The ANC was once revered as the ideal model of an African liberation movement; now it is a cesspool.
About seven years ago, when the rot was already very advanced, a friend of a friend gave me an answer.
He has worked for the ANC for most of his adult life, and he told me that if he had known in 1984 what South Africa would be like today, he would have been ecstatic. Apartheid was entering its last and most violent phase, and hope was very little.
But if you had been told what South Africa would be like now ten years later, when apartheid ended in 1994, South Africa had its first free elections and Nelson Mandela became president, you would have despaired. How is it possible that all those high hopes and good intentions have ended up in the cesspool?
What he was saying was that the future South Africa that would have delighted him in 1984 but horrified him in 1994 was exactly the same country. What he had changed were his expectations for the country.
Just as the evil of apartheid could not survive in an Africa that was leaving colonial values behind, the magnanimous idealism of the philosopher kings, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, was destined to eventually give way to the dirty dealings and dealings of the lesser ANC. members
The ANC will almost certainly lose its majority in parliament for the first time in 2024. It will probably survive for a while longer by forming various coalitions with other parties, but the right will have to go. And maybe, just maybe, South Africa can move to a more normal politics.
