Last week I watched President Cyril Ramaphosa’s two-day testimony at the Zondo commission with very keen interest.
Our president, a man with the golden tongue, has often made questionable statements that any other leader would have been challenged on – particularly by the very bold SA media. Some journalists have argued that this is largely the result of the president’s habit of not taking questions from journalists after making public statements, but I think the issue runs deeper than this. From where I sit, SA media was swept by the “new dawn” wave that Ramaphosa came in with.
After years of a disastrous Jacob Zuma administration, many South Africans, the media included, were desperate for a feel-good story – for something that does not resemble the chaos of the former administration.
Ramaphosa understood this and he played to the gallery with aplomb. In the process, he was able to render everyone soporific – drowsy from the wonderful poetry and lyrics he is so fond of throwing around. And so drowsy that for a long time, no-one was able to scratch beneath the surface of his leadership to see it for the mediocrity that it is.
As I listened to Ramaphosa last week, I realised that the danger about him is not only that he has the ability to hypnotise people, but also that he is in fact a very dishonest man. The man was the deputy president of the country throughout the period of state capture. He sat in the highest office where he was instrumental in the management of the affairs of the state – and did the same too as the deputy president of the governing party.
More than this, when reports were coming out about the rot within state-owned enterprises and government at large, he continued to support former president Zuma, urging ANC members of parliament to do the same.
Today, as has been the case since he started his campaign for office back in 2017, Ramaphosa wants us to believe that he had absolutely no idea of the extent to which state capture was happening until much later. This is despite the fact that issues around the highly problematic Gupta family, for example, were already in the public domain even before he became deputy president.
But as usual, he is feigning shock, claiming not to have known, seen or heard anything, and that when he did, he, like the Son of Man, decided to part the Dead Sea and lead us all to the light and to freedom by “resisting” the capture. This resistance, of course, only occurred when he was campaigning for the presidency at a time when the fall of Zuma was inevitable.
Throughout his presidency, Ramaphosa has done nothing but evade responsibility. The man knows nothing, is complicit in nothing, sees nothing and is shocked by absolutely everything. He wants to have us believe that he spent years standing at a crime scene where a country was being bludgeoned and not only did he not participate, but not a speck of blood splattered on his clothing. A leader with the capacity for dissembling like Ramaphosa is extremely dangerous.
The ability to re-write history is not radically different to that of inventing it. And the invention of history, as we have learned through the Nakba in Palestine, a result of the manufacturing of historical fact, can have devastating consequences.
Society needs to stop treating Ramaphosa like a saint. The media needs to stop treating him like he is above reproach. It enables his blatant disregard for accountability and truth.
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