TOM EATON: Ramaphosa fiddles while Rome burns diesel

For those wondering why President Cyril Ramaphosa is taking so long to reshuffle his cabinet, the answer has now become terribly clear — or at least as clear as anything can be through the fog of the undeclared war being waged by politically protected mafia godfathers against this country and its future.

Way back in the middle of last year, when indefinite load-shedding was still just a twinkle in a Karpowership captain’s eye, some pundits were cautiously optimistic that Ramaphosa would rejig his cabinet in October, quietly ditching some of the desperados named in the Zondo state capture report and replacing them with people who, while not exactly honest in the traditional sense, weren’t obvious sociopaths with a side-hustle in state failure.

Still, any port in a storm, and a couple of months later as the elective conference heaved into view and it became clear that Ramaphosa would need every sociopath on deck, the reshuffle was pushed back. Now, we were told, it would definitely happen once Ramaphosa had been safely re-elected; then, once he had done his state of the nation address; then, after the budget speech.

Now, half a year later, Ramaphosa still fiddles while Rome burns diesel. To be fair, I didn’t expect great haste. If Ramaphosa is ever immortalised in a bronze statue bolted to a granite plinth it will move faster than he ever did.

But even if he was dynamism personified, it wouldn’t help. ANC presidents still have to pretend to consult that damp sack of mushrooms the party calls its “alliance partners”, and while it’s easy enough for him to trundle down to the garden shed, in which the last eight members of the SA Communist Party gather every day to discuss when and how the Soviet Union will win the Cold War, nobody should expect urgency from people defined by their determination to live in the past.

The very recent past is an entirely different story though, and since Friday we’ve gained a new perspective on why Ramaphosa has been so reluctant to tinker with his cabinet. Indeed, if claims made by André De Ruyter, City Press and Daily Maverick are true, and at least two cabinet ministers are currently senior members of criminal cartels carving up Eskom between them, and at least one other cabinet minister knows about at least one of them, then Ramaphosa is clearly trapped on the Ankole-sized horns of a dilemma.

If it’s all true, and if Ramaphosa was told about one or both of the dirty ministers by the unnamed third minister described by De Ruyter, but didn’t fire them at once, then he has clearly and knowingly defeated the ends of justice and sheltered looters at the highest level of government.

If, on the other hand, he fires just two ministers in his reshuffle, he will effectively be naming the scumbags at the centre of this week’s allegations, and, as we know, that is not the ANC way, preferring, as it does, to put the pride of crude men above the demands of justice. All of which means the president needs to fire at least three ministers, which in turn would mean reducing the number of his trusted allies in government by at least 50%.

Yes, it’s a nightmare for Ramaphosa, and perfectly explains what he’s been doing for the past many months, namely he’s praying that nobody puts anything in writing, and that everyone can brazen their way through to 2024, and then walk away with their so-called dignity, ministerial pensions and redeployed Eskom cash intact. And they all might have got there unmolested but for that damned De Ruyter running his treasonous mouth.

To be clear, I don’t know whether De Ruyter was a doing a good job or a bad one. I’m not even sure he knew: bureaucracies are Balkanised at the best of times, but when trusted and honest employees are working alongside secret economic terror cells I don’t know how a CEO measures successes, failures or anything at all.

I’m also not sure if his revelations added dramatically to what we knew already, or at least could infer. Pravin Gordhan was clearly outraged by the claims, but given that he himself was publicly worrying about entrenched sabotage as early as 2018, one can’t help feeling that the minister seems more concerned about the reputation of his colleagues and party than the future of the country.

What is clear though is that De Ruyter has wounded the Ramaphosa administration. Some of the denunciations of the former CEO and of the media that have covered him fairly uncritically have been standard ANC boilerplate, the usual finger-pointing we’ve come to expect from a bully that always pretends to be a victim when it inevitably gets caught in the act.

But through the dutiful outrage the real fury is audible; the raw outrage that courses through a crime family when an outsider who was granted access breaks omerta, the code of silence. To the wreckers, it doesn’t matter whether De Ruyter has revealed facts or merely repeated hearsay — simply the intention to speak up and speak out is enough.

And to go on national TV to claim that the olive oil business is not, in fact, an olive oil business? That’s the kind of thing that gets your coffee tasting faintly of almonds. His replacement has been warned.

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.