EDITORIAL: Follow the process, Mr President

There are moments when history happens quietly. This isn’t one of them. All South Africans will feel the tremors resulting from Wednesday night’s political earthquake.

Former chief justice Sandile Ngcobo’s section 89 report on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s business affairs pertaining to his property in Limpopo, Phala Phala, may ultimately not stand up to the closest parliamentary scrutiny, but that is also not the whole the point. While South Africans are inured to suggestions of presidential corruption, it is important to remember that the allegations against Ramaphosa are extremely serious.

If he has walked into a bear trap, it is reasonable to observe that this would very much be in keeping with his administration to date. The president has never managed to look like he is in control, and as a result he has been unable to deliver the renewal he promised. He has, for example, not been able to stop an appalling and well-planned campaign of destruction at Eskom by organised criminal forces, and he has not been able to bring the private sector into partnerships with state-owned companies.

That he has been unable to smooth his own legal passage is a further indication of his detachment from the real levers of dirty political power. Even in this crisis — the will-he, won’t-he drama of Thursday — was characterised by vacillation and indecision.

Let us not be unclear, whatever its provenance, this is a political crisis that has the potential to hurt us all, and is reminiscent of the shocks resulting from former president Jacob Zuma’s meddling with the National Treasury. It is an outrageous state of affairs.

We must read Ngcobo’s incendiary report carefully, because this is a moment in which principles must prevail, and in which we need to guard against distraction. It would be easy — if unwise — to sacrifice principle on the altar of our fears. The question on the lips of those who want SA to thrive betrays this. Who else, if not Ramaphosa, should lead the ANC and, by extension, the country? Whatever the president decides to do, it is fair to assume that all the deals sewn up ahead of the ANC’s elective conference are vulnerable to a swift undoing. In this context, 2024’s general election feels like a very distant horizon, and the road to it potholed with risk.  

The ANC must consider its future with seriousness for its own survival, but our anxiety about the answer it may give us cannot overrule the fact that we must do what is right.  The findings of Ngcobo’s report require a proper airing. They suggest that Ramaphosa ought to engage fully with an impeachment process. That is the legal protection citizens are offered in a case such as this and, as much as it is good that parliament has rediscovered its voice in implementing the section 89 process after failing to hold Zuma to account in 2017, it is only right that it completes its work in holding the current president to account.  

Pragmatically, this is unlikely to happen, as ANC MPs will not vote for impeachment of their own president in the year before a general election. The ANC is more likely to want to handle this internally. That is not the kind of democratic renewal we need, but the party will have to account to voters soon enough. How it handles — or mishandles — this Phala Phala affair will influence voters in 2024.

However, now is not the time for us to concern ourselves with the ANC’s apparent inability to renew itself. The president should submit himself to an impeachment process.