December 27, 2022 10:23
“Don’t you have a sofa stuffed with money? Don’t worry, you can continue reading for free”, reads an advertisement on the website of the Daily Maverick, an inflexible and sometimes very amusing South African weekly. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cash-strapped sofa has become a meme powerful and universally recognised, but still hasn’t brought it down.
Ramaphosa was known as Mr Clean, and was thought to be so wealthy that he didn’t need to steal. The mission he set for himself, completing it in 2017, was to oust the previous president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, and to make a clean sweep of corruption.
Zuma and his cronies were spectacularly corrupt and had turned the government apparatus into a dispenser of money for themselves, a dynamic that came to be known as “state seizure.” Even the African National Congress (ANC), which led the liberation struggle and has been in power ever since, knew it had gone too far. And for this he voted against Zuma and in favor of Ramaphosa.
No one can become a billionaire (not even in South African rands) without doing some economics, but Ramaphosa had the backing of the South African business community, which was choked by corruption. He was also seen as the last and brightest hope by the remaining uncorrupted sections of the ANC, which saw his votes plummet in the last election.
A suspicious theft
Once in power, he took action against a few corrupt individuals, but there hasn’t been the decisive cleansing within the party that his supporters had hoped for. Zuma’s faction, rooted primarily in the Zulu-majority province of KwaZulu Natal, has continued to hold high office and influence politics, and five years later Ramaphosa is perceived by many as a disappointment.
A disappointment, but at least not a swindler, so for lack of a better candidate, he was still considered a safe candidate for re-election as ANC president
Yet in between was the business of the upholstered sofa. Last June, a man close to Zuma reported to the judiciary a theft that took place two years ago: it was a figure between four hundred thousand and four million dollars that was hidden inside the back of a sofa on the Ramaphosa farm, in the north of South Africa.
He had not reported the theft, as he was required to do by law. Instead, he sent his chief bodyguard to Namibia to recover the stolen money, without saying anything. Perhaps that money was not the result of corruption but Ramaphosa, at the very least, hid some money that he should have reported and on which he would have had to pay taxes.
The ANC was once revered as the ideal model of an African liberation movement; today it is a cesspool
Despite losing the title of Mr Clean, Ramaphosa was nonetheless re-elected as party leader and 2024 presidential candidate at the ANC national congress on 19 December, largely due to a lack of more plausible candidates. But it was close: Ramaphosa got 2,476 votes, while the pro-corruption and pro-Zuma candidate, Zweli Mkhize, got 1,897.
How did we get to all this? The ANC was once revered as the ideal model of an African liberation movement; today it is a cesspit.
About seven years ago, when the rot was well advanced, a friend of a friend offered me an answer.
This is someone who has worked for the ANC for most of his adult life and he told me that if he had known in 1984 what South Africa would look like today, he would have been ecstatic. Apartheid was entering its last and most violent phase and hopes were very limited.
But if that question had been asked of him ten years later, in 1994 – when apartheid ended, the country held its first free elections, and Nelson Mandela became president – he would have despaired. How did all those high hopes and good intentions turn into a cesspool?
The gist of his reasoning was that the future South Africa, which would delight him in 1984 but shock him in 1994, was exactly the same country. What had changed were his expectations.
Just as the evil of apartheid could not survive in an Africa that was leaving colonial values behind, the highly ethical idealism of the philosopher kings, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, was bound to give way, sooner or later. then, to the malpractice of the less valuable politicians of the ANC.
Current ANC members are animated by the boundless presumption that everything is their due. They believe they have sacrificed themselves for the country, and therefore it is now up to the country to pay them back. It was almost inevitable that it would come to this point, but things won’t end there.
In 2024, the ANC will almost certainly lose its majority in parliament for the first time. It will probably survive for a while longer, forming various coalitions with other parties, but this idea that everything is due to it will have to end. And then maybe – just maybe – South Africa will be able to move to a more normal kind of politics.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)