TESSA DOOMS | SA must raise its expectation of the leadership we deserve

Is the president up to the task of leading the country out of the many crises we face? The initial "Ramaphoria" has died down. President Cyril Ramaphosa entered the presidency on the back of the ousting of former president Jacob Zuma, and a wave of support for his promises, vague as they were, of a "New Dawn".

Emerging to the top job in the country in a political climate where the overwhelming calls were for "anyone but Zuma", Ramaphosa was set a very low bar to clear to be the best man for the job. People were willing to overlook his role in Zuma’s cabinet as deputy president. Accusations about his political involvement in the 2021 Marikana Massacre were hushed. A path was cleared for him to become the next president with his only intervention being “Thuma Mina (Send Me)”.

So low was the bar that Ramaphosa did not need to cast a clear vision of the future he wanted to lead SA into. As a vision, the "New Ddawn" was more poetic than substantive, anchored on a promise that was limited to ending the corruption under the Zuma administration rather than inspiring bold and pragmatic plan to depoliticise the state, reconfigure political networks and break the back of patronage-based politics that enables corruption far beyond the Guptas or Zuma associates.

The bar was set low, but Ramaphosa has proven to have no ambitions to raise it. In the first week of December 2022, it was widely reported that Ramaphosa planned to resign. The rumoured resignation was touted amid an impending impeachment vote in parliament over the outcomes of an independent legal panel report that found that there was sufficient cause for parliament to further probe and debate whether the president’s actions during the Phala Phala farm scandal amounted to a contravention of his oath of office.

In the weeks leading up to the ANC elective conference later that month, senior ANC leaders, including Gwede Mantashe and Ronald Lamola, confirmed on public platforms that the president had offered to resign but had been convinced to remain in office.

This fits a larger narrative that has for years suggested that Ramaphosa needs to be politically protected. In 2018 when he first took office, Ramaphosa was shielded from criticism with arguments made that the balance of forces within the ANC were against him because he inherited Zuma’s cabinet and had a marginal win in the 2017 Nasrac conference.

The irony was that even with a narrow win Ramaphosa was able unseat Zuma more than a year before his term ended, but was not politically strong enough to set his own agenda with people he trusted.

Post the 2019 election victory, Ramaphosa has been shielded from accountability by people committed to the idea that he was politically hamstrung by a factional ANC. His continued indecision on policy direction, underperforming ministers and managing political tensions like those that led to the 2021 July riots have been glibly chalked down to the president having a week political hand.

Even now, after what his ANC supporters have called a resounding win at the 2022 ANC conference, with an NEC stacked in his favour, we continue to watch the country deteriorate under the political leadership of a president who is at best reactive and routinely tentative, unsure, slow to action, unaccountable and deeply uninspiring, who has all but told the nation that he would rather be tending to his farm than taking on the sacred tasks of presidency.

A billionaire president who has for years been cast as a political victim is now presenting as a political hostage. Trapped by the factionalised balances of power within his party, suffocated by mounting crises and caught flat-footed at every turn. We are asked as a nation to be patient as we wait for Ramaphosa to reshuffle a cabinet that has not had a minister of state security since August 2021, no minister of public administration since April 2021, a conflicted minster of transport since December 2022 and a technically resigned deputy president since January 2023. Yet as March 2023 beckons, the president fiddles on the issue of political direction as SA burns.

The State of the Nation Address and tabling of the budget speech have come and gone, but SA still feels like a nation at sea, rudderless without a captain and increasingly without a trusted crew.