Chief Justice Zondo skewers Ramaphosa

WE’RE stuffed. It’s the devil and the deep blue sea dilemma on an epic scale.

It is difficult to imagine any president in any democracy that we might want to emulate could survive such a scathing assessment by the nation’s Chief Justice of his integrity and ability.

And it leaves South Africa in an existential dilemma of tragic proportions. If President Cyril Ramaphosa were to resign or be ousted now – as seems possible – the criminal gangs identified in the Zondo Commission’s previous findings again immediately seize control of the state and resume their plunder.

Even worse, they would also ensure that, as with Zimbabwe, which the cadres so admire, no democratic election would take place in South Africa in the foreseeable future to interrupt their criminality.

South Africans could not reasonably have expected much of the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, headed by then Deputy Chief Justice, now Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, in its final report.

In its voluminous earlier findings, it had already exhaustively and convincingly detailed the depth and breadth of corruption.

Without rancour, but sometimes with something approaching disbelief, it outlined the role played by former president Jacob Zuma, the Gupta clan, and an odious cabal of ANC ministers, their families and party hangers-on deployed to key positions in state departments and agencies.

After more than four years and 9 million pages of evidence from more than 300 witnesses, the Zondo Commission does not have to trigger a single prosecution of any of around 1500 people it identifies as criminally implicated to prove this point.

Incontrovertibly, whether anyone goes to jail or not, we now know that the South African state was captured and then looted from top to tail to the tune of at least R1.4 trillion by the very people who had sworn a solemn oath to guard it.

In any case, those processes of accountability and punishment, despite the mantras of police and judicial independence, are largely determined by political, not legal, decisions. The supposedly reformist ANC is a cowering and timorous beastie.

It has yet to prosecute a single one of the dirty dozen prominent ANC members who the president said plotted and launched that insurrection. So, in terms of Justice Zondo, we should have no expectations of a public culling of ANC leaders, who did nothing more reprehensible than feathering their nests.

To assess the ultimate value of the commission, one needs to decide whether the Ramaphosa ANC, the “good” ANC, is dealt with in the same manner that Justice Zondo torpedoed through the Zuma ANC, the “bad” ANC. In other words, whether the commission accepted at face value several implausible statements by Ramaphosa during his two appearances before the commission.

A key issue was cadre deployment. Speaking with uncharacteristic passion, Ramaphosa pleaded with Justice Zondo on at least two occasions not to find against the party’s deployment practices.

Ramaphosa also replied to questioning that the noxiousness or otherwise of the deployment committee’s activities during the five years he chaired it, couldn’t be determined by consulting its minutes. Either none had been kept or they had been lost, he was not sure which.

A second key issue was the president’s explanation of his silence about state looting while serving as Zuma’s deputy. His “say nothing, do nothing” approach was motivated not by complicity or cowardice, but was a canny strategy to “resist abuses”, but without being “confrontational”.

In other words, the gist of Ramaphosa’s weeks of evidence was that if anything bad happened, it wasn’t his fault, because he hadn’t known about it. And the benign nature of cadre deployment could not be shown because the dog ate the committee’s minutes.

Justice Zondo wasn’t taken in. He deftly skewers Ramaphosa, delivering another blow to a president already under pressure from allegations of personal involvement in criminality arising from the Farmgate scandal.

Ramaphosa was dilatory in responding to state capture, and ineffectual when he did. While Justice Zondo never directly accuses the president of lying, he notes repeatedly that Ramaphosa fails to answer directly the commission’s questions.

While Ramaphosa “makes much of his drive to right the wrongs of state capture”, he was “opaque” in his evidence as to what he knew, how he learnt about it, and what was the “tipping point” signalling the need for action. Ramaphosa’s version was, in essence, “that he saw nothing that raised alarm bells” for a very long time.

Nor was his “resistance” convincing. “It is difficult to understand why allegations in the public domain – in some cases made by loyal ANC members – continued to go unaddressed for so long.”

Justice Zondo questions the “effectiveness” of Ramaphosa’s decision to remain within the state and party. “We must ask ourselves whether (State Capture) could not have been arrested sooner if powerful people, like President Ramaphosa, had been willing to act with more urgency.”

Justice Zondo scoffs at Ramaphosa’s repeated statements that the ANC had “drawn a line in the sand” against corruption and was “committed to renewal and change”.

Ramaphosa “offered no real analysis or explanation” why these promises, made many times in the past 20 years, had failed and might now succeed: “He only stated that it is better late than never”.

Justice Zondo dismisses Ramaphosa’s claim that the ANC had been unable to act on state capture because it didn’t have “direct evidence at the time”, nor the investigative capacity to probe the allegations. Newspaper articles had provided “credible and verifiable information” about Gupta corruption since at least 2011, writes Justice Zondo. Ramaphosa, however, was unable to “offer any explanation of the failure to act”.

Rather gallingly for Ramaphosa, as the supposed supreme protector of the South African Constitution, Justice Zondo intimates that neither the president nor his party comprehends the nation’s founding document.

Dealing with Ramaphosa’s justifications for not allowing ANC MPs to vote their conscience in the parliamentary no-confidence debate on Zuma, Justice Zondo highlights a fundamental failure to understand the Constitution.

“The natural conclusion … is that the ANC prioritises its own survival and strength over the constitutional obligations of its members.”

Ramaphosa “unfortunately failed to grapple with the core of the issue – that the ANC’s internal checks and balances did fail, and (it then) sought to prevent the proper exercise of a constitutional mechanism of accountability”.

Turning to ANC cadre deployment, Justice Zondo found it “improbable” that there were no records of the deployment committee for the Ramaphosa years. It was also clear from other minutes of the committee – the non-Ramaphosa years – that the committee “does not always merely make recommendations, but in fact often instructs”, and that appointing authorities “including Cabinet, are de facto bound by [its] decisions”.

But Justice Zondo was at his most politely scornful when he turned Ramaphosa’s promises for the future and “the process of renewal upon which the ANC has ostensibly embarked”.

“What is abundantly clear … is that for as long as the ANC is in power, the failure of the ANC successfully to reform and renew itself as undertaken by President Ramaphosa, will render the South African state unable to rid itself of the scourge of State Capture and corruption.”

The question for the ANC and South Africa to now decide is whether any “reform and renewal” can come from within the party.

If a general election were to be held tomorrow, the people’s answer is likely to be unambiguous. The ANC would be out.

However, if Ramaphosa – whatever his dismal catalogue of failings, he is not a despot-in-waiting – doesn’t survive until such an election is held (the next one is scheduled for 2024), it probably does not matter how the people vote. The fix will be in, Zimbabwe style.