Ramaphosa’s ‘mission impossible’

With President Cyril Ramaphosa approaching the 100-day mark as South Africa’s fifth post-apartheid leader, he faces what amounts to a “mission impossible” in the form of multiple, contending priorities to put his country back on a growth path and avoid increasing social tensions and political strife.

Indicative of the almost insurmountable obstacles facing Ramaphosa are the recent national bus drivers’ strike, which ran for almost a month and caused widespread disruptions to business and commerce, a full-scale “rolling mass action” stay-away undertaken recently by one of the country’s largest union bodies representing 800,000 members, numerous land invasions across the country and consequent police action some of which was violent, plus dysfunction in both his ruling African National Congress (ANC) party and provincial governance in three of the country’s nine provinces.

And that is by no means a complete description of everything on his plate.

DESTRUCTIVE TENURE

Initially, the business sector in particular and most ordinary South Africans were delighted that Ramaphosa had succeeded in pushing former president Jacob Zuma from his destructive two-term tenure in office.

There was excitement at renewed possibilities and hope – a “new dawn” reminiscent of the Mandela era – but almost immediately the “Ramaphoria” which followed his election to the presidency was met by strong headwinds.

Not the least of these was the poor performance of the SA economy, projected this year to come in at around 1.3 per cent of GDP growth – roughly a third of what is needed.

Ramaphosa inherited a State which was essentially broke, with a R50 billion ($4 billion) shortfall in revenue collections for the previous year alone – and another large shortfall predicted for the current fiscal year.

BAILOUT BILLIONS

On top of this, major State-owned enterprises such as the power utility Eskom, the rail provider and national airline SA Airways are in deep debt to the tune of billions of dollars and require yet more billions in bailouts and loans.

Many towns and municipalities are in arrears to the tune of millions of dollars each to Eskom as residents have continued, during the post-apartheid era, with non-payment for services such as electricity, similar to non-payment protests during the race-based apartheid era.

Citizens across the country are refusing to pay as they say that government services are either poor or non-existent – or that they simply can’t afford to pay for them.

Consequently, dozens of local government bodies are also in huge arrears for fresh water and sanitation services.

But the central government cannot and will not allow these local governments to be cut off or to stop basic service provision because it is harmful to the economy and will cause uproar among the ANC's core constituencies.

SERVICE DELIVERY

South Africa has in the last several years experienced literally thousands of so-called “service delivery” protests in urban slums across the country, with hundreds turning violent.

With the arrival of Ramaphosa in the presidential office, it was widely hoped that his party, which still governs the great majority of cities and towns across the country, would clean up its act and actually begin delivering on promises made in the run-up to the 1994 democratic elections and which are now more than 24 years overdue.

Among the promises made to the SA electorate were that life would be greatly improved for the previously oppressed – which is to say “black” – majority, that electricity and fresh water provision along with improved sanitation facilities and services would be made available in shanty towns around the country, that formal houses would be built on a massive scale to replace shanty town settlements, and that a living wage would be established as the baseline to fight poverty and crime.

MISSPENDING

But, despite some real progress in providing electricity to informal settlements and in many cases fresh water too, there have also been many reversals in the post-apartheid era, such as local authorities misspending monies and failing to keep water reticulation systems operational, or power outages extending from days into weeks, in some cases.

Poor service delivery by national, provincial and local government and continued high unemployment have soured the average South African’s view of their future significantly – a feeling that was reversed briefly after Ramaphosa’s ascension to power.

For instance, a quarterly poll of CEOs found that business leaders were as optimistic shortly after Ramaphosa became SA president as they were in 2012, before the full impact of Zuma’s “state capture” system of patronage and corruption kicked in.

The “Ramaphosa rally” did not just perk up the SA currency, but caused CEO confidence to jump from a pessimistic 38.4 points in the fourth quarter of 2017 to an optimistic 60 points in the first quarter of 2018.

ESCALATING CRISIS

Sixty days into his presidency, Ramaphosa announced the appointment of four economic envoys to unlock significant investment into South Africa, including former finance minister Trevor Manuel and former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas.

But even as he was embarking on an international road-show to say that “SA is open for business”, Ramaphosa had to leave his delegation and rush home to deal with a rapidly escalating crisis in Northwest Province, which borders Botswana.

That crisis was triggered, yet again, by unhappiness among ordinary South Africans about basic service delivery, though there was also a more overt political dimension.

The rioters – who had to be fired on by police on numerous occasions in a bid to restore order so that the Botswana-SA border crossing could be re-opened after being forced to close because of the unrest – were blaming the province’s Zuma-supporting provincial leader and demanding his ouster on grounds of corruption involving Zuma’s friends, the infamous “Guptas”, who are being sought for involvement in corruption.

DSYFUNCTIONAL

Eventually the ruling ANC invoked a constitutional option to take over the running of the province by national government as the only hope of getting the almost completely dysfunctional provincial government back on its feet.

While that was going on, there was continued factional trouble in the Eastern Cape province, which has yet to hold a long-delayed provincial ANC elective conference after last year’s conference devolved into chaotic chair-throwing and punch-ups.

And in Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal contention between Ramaphosa and Zuma camps within the ruling party continues to cause mounting tension, with at least two more senior ANC local government figures assassinated in the last week alone.

CORRUPTION

The problem for Ramaphosa, who repeatedly promised the country and international investors that among his top priorities would be to end systemic corruption, is that in fulfilling this inauguration promise he will be taking down people and syndicates whose tentacles reach to the very heart of government at all levels.

In a bid to weaken those networks, both the heads of the SA Revenue Service and the State Security Agency have recently been removed from office.

But those moves, welcome as they have been, have addressed only the tip of the corruption iceberg.

SA still has a formal unemployment figure near 27 per cent, with youth unemployment at 60 per cent, and has been measured as one of the most economically unequal societies in the world.

University and other tertiary students were promised by Zuma that they would get free tertiary education – something which the Ramaphosa government has been forced to accept but has no way of covering and is therefore introducing over several years.

HOUSING BACKLOG

There is a vast formal housing backlog and Ramaphosa is also dealing with the fall-out of the ruling party’s promise that the country’s negotiated constitution would be changed to allow for land expropriation without compensation.

While popular among those agitating for land reform, this move has already curtailed the direct foreign investment which SA needs to get the economy running properly again.

Forces opposed to land expropriation are, meanwhile, gathering and a major fight is set for the courts, a process that is bound to drag on for months to years.

Beyond the legal struggle, many Afrikaner land owners say they simply will not abide with having what they strongly feel is their land taken from them without a literal fight.

With black power militancy on the rise, union movements on the street, entire townships engaged in running battles with the police and a sense of time rapidly running out, Ramaphosa faces a situation not very different to that which brought the white minority apartheid regime to the negotiating table in the early 1990s.

COUNTER-CURRENTS

And on top of all that, there is a looming election, now just a year away, in which the ANC is likely to face severe penalties if Ramaphosa cannot pull off what amounts to a series of “miracles”.

Already, the heady days after Zuma’s ousting have been replaced by an increasing militancy among the disillusioned millions.

Ramaphosa needs, somehow, to calm the agitated citizenry down, get land reform working properly, get the economy back on track and people into jobs, get foreign investors to put their money into this country and generally begin to more fully deliver on what the ANC was saying, a quarter of a century ago, it would do once it was in power.

It is by no means clear how exactly he will pull that off, with a limping economy and political counter-currents that look set to not merely make the “Ramaphoria” era short, but which are setting the scene for a much more troubled South Africa than has been the case since the late 1980s.