PETER BRUCE: We need to have some patience while Ramaphosa works his plan
Extract
Business confidence, I read somewhere, is back up where it was six months ago, before people realised President Cyril Ramaphosa was going to do this his way and not turn the entire Jacob Zuma catastrophe around in an afternoon. That’s good. The folks who were spooked by the whole thing into leaving the country have by now left. The rest of us have work to do.
If you’ve been following the news and the evidence coming out of the commissions of inquiry into state capture and the SA Revenue Service (Sars), you’ll have an idea just how toxic Zuma’s years were. And by now we all know that while some heads have rolled there are still hundreds of Zuma appointees lurking all over all tiers of the government.
They will take time to work out of the system, and Ramaphosa has his own orchestra to conduct. He wants a crescendo around about March or April 2019, just before a May election. By then he’ll have a national director of public prosecutions in place. There’ll be arrests, I promise. In fact, parliament has just ratified a brand-new extradition treaty with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and I would be surprised if there were not efforts already under way to get the Gupta brothers back here and in prison in time for election day. A leader with even a little flair would organise their return two to three weeks before the vote. I would land them at Waterkloof and this time invite the world’s press to witness them being escorted to waiting police vans. Either that, or land them at OR Tambo and taxi to the Oppenheimers’ Fireblade terminal on the far side of the airport. It’s there that they sealed poor Malusi Gigaba’s fate. They had been using the terminal until one day a Gupta lackey trie...
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