Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
CAPE TOWN - One of the most mysterious contradictions emerging from this year’s State of the Nation Address debate is that it seems to be an unwritten rule of the Parliamentarians Club, that they will not directly call for the resignation of one of their own, including President Cyril Ramaphosa.
This unconstitutional and mischievous rule prevails despite the majority of opposition MPs appearing to be neither dedicated to Ramaphosa’s removal nor committed to his survival as of last week’s uninspiring address to the nation.
Most South Africans commenting on the debate continue to ask: what is standing in the way for Parliament, by a resolution adopted with a supporting vote of at least two thirds of its members, to remove the president from office because of inability to perform the functions of office?
EFF leader Julius Malema has mercilessly skewered Ramaphosa in the debate over unfulfilled promises, calling him “the worst president to have ever occurred to black people”, but he has refrained from unequivocally telling him to walk.
DA leader John Steenhuisen delivered a powerful speech on Monday, in which he listed all the reasons why President Ramaphosa is unfit to remain in office.
He is not prepared to walk away from “the ANC policy of cadre deployment”, he admitted that “by setting up a parallel state” in his office, he appointed “outsiders like Sipho Nkosi, Mavuso Msimang and Daniel Mminele” to do the job of his Cabinet and he would rather “protect the unity of the ANC than put the country first”.
“You see your job as holding together this rag-tag mob of crooks and free-loaders, even if that means the destruction of our country,” declared Steenhuisen and made the vital argument, “Accountability is something you only talk about because actually doing something about it would mean firing most of your Cabinet and upsetting your comrades. And we all know you'd rather be a weak president than do that.”
This was punchy, pungent and potent. And it was all true. Steenhuisen sounded like he was building up to a clarion call to MPs to remove Ramaphosa, but then his trumpet went mute when he tabled a motion of no confidence – not in the president – but in Cabinet, and went on to promise Ramaphosa the DA's support for a reform agenda.
In so doing, he conveniently overlooked an important political and constitutional point; that the president appoints the executive members, assigns their powers and functions, and may dismiss them.
Eager to wound, but unwilling to strike, Steenhuisen and other opposition politicians reflect the state of our Parliament that is simultaneously infuriated and paralysed by a scandal of an underperforming executive that is also a crisis.
Unemployment, on the broad definition, is at 44%. The IMF projects that economic growth for the medium term will hardly be higher than population growth, which means people will continue to get poorer.
Economic growth will also be lower than the interest rate the government pays to fund the deficit.
That means the debt burden will continue to grow and could soon overwhelm the country, unless the government introduces major spending cuts.
It is easy to find MPs across political parties who are seething about the impotence of Ramaphosa’s leadership and increasingly hard to find ones who think that he will successfully lead the country out of the chronic economic and social hardships, let alone successfully lead the ANC into the next general elections in 2024.
This leaves the ANC, and with it the government, marooned in a suffocating passive mode.
Purely as a matter of constitutional mandate and self-interest, MPs have clear incentives to dispatch Ramaphosa and his Cabinet without delay. The confidence ratings for the executive – also judging by the discontent expressed during the Sona debate on numerous issues including the July 2021 unrest – are plumbing depths from which leaders seldom recover, and the public fury is dragging the ANC down with Ramaphosa.
There are many more in the ANC and the private sector relishing having the president in a prostrate position and desperate to please them ahead of the party’s elective conference in December where he will be seeking re-election as its leader.
Yet, this is not sustainable because different ANC factions of hostage-takers are demanding conflicting things from this passive president.
And most of their demands are inimical to the interests of the country, which include strengthening of an efficient and accountable government.
The more patronage Ramaphosa flings in the direction of ravenous voting blocks in the ANC’s elective conference, the more he aggravates other social partners he has promised in his Sona to enter into a new social compact with within 100 days “to revitalise our economy”, and “end inequality and injustice” that impeded SA’s progress.
The ATM first tabled its motion of no confidence in February 2020, and the motion is due for a secret vote in the coming weeks.
Other small parties such as the AIC have quietly indicated their willingness to support the motion.
Then there is a group of indeterminable numbers in the ANC who want Ramaphosa gone, but are hesitant about acting.
They privately say that they are holding back until they are more confident that they can cleanly eject him from office through the ANC’s step-aside policy if he is implicated or is indecisive in acting against those implicated in corruption by the state capture commission of inquiry report.
It appears as though when the time finally comes to vote on this motion of no confidence, the MPs will sway this way and that, depending on the movement of the political patronage winds, news events, the contents of their inboxes and postbags regarding the outcome of the forthcoming by-elections, the media and what activists and fellow elected representatives in other spheres of government are saying to them.
The government will remain trapped in this nightmare passive mode, and the country with it, until the majority of MPs cease equivocating and a critical mass of them decide to bring things to a head by nudging the president into active mode.
Nyembezi is a policy analyst and human rights activist
Cape Times