Crisis of command - Cyril Ramaphosa's unravelling presidency: William Saunderson-Meyer
This article was first published in WSM’s JAUNDICED EYE column on PoliticsWeb.
Key topics:
Ramaphosa faces growing calls to resign amid leadership failures
Mkhwanazi’s claims expose deep police, political corruption
SA’s global standing declines as G20 role and US ties falter
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By William Saunderson-Meyer
President Cyril Ramaphosa is losing the country. His hold on it is unravelling like a ball of frayed string rolling downhill.
The Government of National Unity, which had vowed to rescue South Africa, is dysfunctional, largely because of the President’s appalling lack of leadership. Unprecedented depths of economic and social distress have heightened public discontent, and one senses that it needs just a spark — the assassination of a whistleblowing general or a clash over migrants — to erupt. Barely a year after Ramaphosa’s re-election, he is facing pushback from previously steadfast supporters. They are challenging his decisions, questioning his competence, and some are calling for his resignation.
The ever-faster cascade has punctured the President’s customary sang-froid. He has made foolish decisions that he has had to try to correct on the hoof, and he has been caught in fabrications that he must have been bound to be exposed.
Lieutenant‑General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s explosive allegations about political meddling, cadre deployment and institutional capture within law enforcement and the justice system left Ramaphosa flat-footed. He dithered for a week about what to do, before trying to reassure the nation in a lacklustre televised address that, irritatingly for the dwindling numbers of those who bothered to watch, started a now-habitual 30 minutes late.
It shows how out of touch Ramaphosa has become that, despite the gravity of Mkhwanazi’s allegations, he genuinely seemed to think he could protect his close ally Police Minister Senzo Mchunu and Deputy National Commissioner Shadrack Sibiya. Brushing aside the blatant impropriety of leaving the two most powerful figures under investigation in their posts, he waffled about ‘due process’ and blithely insisted on ‘all those implicated continuing in their duties until the processes unfold’. Tellingly, he made no mention of immediately reconstituting the highly effective Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) that Mchunu disbanded.
Public outrage swiftly made his stance untenable. Mchunu tried to spare the President further humiliation by announcing that to clear his name, he was taking ‘special leave’ at his own request. Bowing to the inevitable, the SAPS top brass belatedly placed Sibiya on precautionary suspension. But the PKTT remains neutralised.
As Mchunu’s stand‑in, Ramaphosa chose Prof Firoz Cachalia. A respected academic who, on paper, looked like a safe choice, Cachalia arrives with baggage of his own.
On the plus side, he chaired the National Anti‑Corruption Advisory Council, set up in the wake of the Zondo Commission to chart a path for law enforcement reform. Its report is whispered to be hard‑hitting, but few know for certain. It was delivered to Ramaphosa in late 2023 or early 2024 but never made public. Since then, the only moves made on the corruption landscape have been to stonewall any attempts to create, as the DA is currently trying to do, an independent investigative agency akin to the once-feared Scorpions, who were disbanded by the ANC during the Zuma years.
The Cachalia negatives are as yet untested, but hard to ignore. When Mkhwanazi earlier this year went public for the first time with claims of political meddling, Cachalia accused him of ‘public grandstanding’ and implausibly urged him to stick to the internal police channels that he accused of corruption. Little wonder that the EFF dismisses Cachalia as Ramaphosa’s ‘constitutional weapon’ to shield his allies. Together with MK, it is threatening a court challenge on constitutional grounds, which though unlikely to succeed, will make his life more difficult.
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But the comedy continues. Cachalia insists that he cannot take up the post until 1 August because he is still on the Wits University payroll pending his retirement day. Such rigidity hints at a pernickety mindset that may not flourish in Ramaphosa’s ethically flexible and morally freewheeling Cabinet. Farcically, the Police portfolio in the meantime has been handed to Gwede Mantashe, the most compromised but longest-serving minister Ramaphosa has ever had.
It’s during all this slapstick that the Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, deemed it an opportune to release the 2024-2028 National Security Strategy assessment, which confusingly concludes that despite political assassinations, incipient terrorism, violent extremism, economic sabotage and rampant corruption, South Africa is a stable and secure nation.
She then went on to make some extraordinary remarks at the press conference about a potential coup d’état. Since this is never mentioned in the report, it has been interpreted as a jibe directed at Mkhwanazi.
‘There is,’ Ntshavheni told the increasingly befuddled journalists, ‘a potential risk of a coup d‘état. We have identified it and put measures in place to mitigate against it. So, that’s why we say to South Africans that there will not be anyone attempting to do a coup in South Africa. In the last few days or in the last few weeks, there has not been anyone attempting to do a coup in South Africa. That does not mean people are not planning one.’
Or as Lewis Carroll put it with greater elegance and far less chance of rocking investor confidence, ‘If it was so, it might be. And if it were so, it would be. But as it isn’t, it ain’t.’
The Ramaphosa administration is also looking comical and out of its depth on the foreign front.
South Africa’s presidency of the G20, meant to be a centrepiece of Ramaphosa’s second term, seems to be crumbling around his ears. Although Ramaphosa is meant to pass the baton to President Donald Trump in November, the US has not attended a single ministerial gathering. This week’s meeting of finance ministers in Johannesburg was drained of much of its significance by the absence of the US Treasury Secretary.
Then there is the debacle over Trump’s looming swingeing trade tariffs. With only a fortnight before their implementation, no deal has yet been struck, and the Presidency is thrashing about, and lying through its teeth, over the role of its Special Envoy, Mcebisi Jonas. This week, it issued a furious statement rubbishing DA MP Emma Powell’s revelation that Jonas had been refused a US diplomatic visa as far back as May. Yet, months ago, after first denying that Jonas was persona non grata to the White House, Ramaphosa’s presidential spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, had sheepishly admitted that Washington had indeed indicated that they had a problem with Jonas.
Meanwhile, Ramaphosa remains determined to exclude from the process those who actually have insight into US thinking — Solidarity and other Afrikaner groups who have been talking directly to senior White House and Treasury officials — and those who have moral currency with Washington, namely the DA. Instead, the government sneers at the Afrikaners; fires the DA Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry, Andrew Whitfield, for joining a DA delegation to the US in February; and accuses the DA of plotting ‘regime change’ in cahoots with the US.
Such flailing is not surprising given the virulently anti‑US clique entrenched at the foreign ministry. It does, however, underline the fact that Ramaphosa is struggling in the international arena, the place where he believed his natural affability and South Africa’s self‑appointed role as the world’s ‘moral superpower’, to use expelled former ambassador Ebrahim Rasool’s phrase, would carry the day and allow him to shine.
Unfortunately for Ramaphosa, his other pet project, the National Dialogue, is not going to save the day for him. Led by an array of ANC-aligned and pretentiously-named ‘Eminent Persons’, the Dialogue this week limped into operation. It has a R700m budget but zero credibility now that all the opposition parties, including the ANC’s partners in the GNU, have distanced themselves from it.
These are just the latest manifestations of Ramaphosa’s preference for symbolism over action. Along with the wishy-washy response to Mkhwanazi, they together may be the final straw for some who helped engineer his ascent to power. Even ANC‑legacy foundations, long accustomed to wielding quiet influence behind the scenes, are publicly voicing their frustrations.
This week, the Walter & Albertina Sisulu Foundation issued a blistering statement, warning that Ramaphosa’s habit of ‘preaching dialogue while insulating political elites from accountability’ amounts to little more than political theatre. The Foundation charged that his leadership — tarnished by the still‑unresolved Phala Phala scandal — ‘contradicts the very principles his administration claims to uphold’.
The Foundation reached a stark conclusion: it’s time for Ramaphosa to resign.
This article was first published in WSM’s JAUNDICED EYE column on PoliticsWeb and is republished with permission.