Ramaphosa and the time of tough choices

President Cyril Ramaphosa said a lot on Thursday in his replies to parliamentary questions raised by the State of the Nation Address (SONA). But perhaps the weightiest thing he said, commenting on the upcoming 2019 budget, was “We are at a moment in our history where we need to make difficult choices.”

This is an important statement because it is very, very hard for politicians to make difficult choices, such as cutting popular social spending programs or raising taxes. Politicians are elected and when they make difficult choices, they often don’t get reelected. Therefore, it’s almost always easier for them to kick the can down the road. You see something similar happening generationally – in the West, current old age programs are unaffordable, but no one wants to make difficult choices, so they’re just leaving the problems for their kids to sort out.

It’s only during times of crisis that politicians are able to make difficult choices – when England was at war, people accepted rationing, something that would not go down at all today. And what Ramaphosa is saying is that we are now in a time of crisis, when difficult choices become both necessary and possible. The capacity to make the difficult choice is the single most important quality South Africa needs in a president right now. Soon, we’ll know for certain whether Ramaphosa has it.

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