http://www.abrbuzz.co.za JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2018 55
Now, along with Team Ramaphosa, Gigaba will jet off to Davos
and the World Economic Forum, in order to convince investors
that Eskom’s billion-dollar bond issue is a sound fi nancial bet.
If they fail, and if the market doesn’t slurp up the power utility’s
debt like a journalist at an open bar during an awards ceremony,
South Africa arrives at something of an existential crisis.Indeed, the country has been robbed to the very edge of the
abyss, and it would be nice if some bad people did some jail
time. As far as prong two is concerned, South Africa remains the
capital of Truth and Reconciliation, where mass murderers run
bespoke cardiology outfi ts, and white-collar corporate criminals
have the ear of the most powerful man in the country.And so, Revolution, Ramaphosa style: We must forthwith chop
off the head of the king, without in any way damaging his neck.
The National Executive Committee has courageously agreed in
principle that the president must be recalled, but they don’t want
his exit to be in any way rushed or undignifi ed. (This brings to
mind the words of St. Augustine, who said, “Give me chastity and
continence, but not yet.”)That a not-so-petty thief like Zuma is being accorded so much
respect smacks of something sinister: a deal, the terms of
which are currently being negotiated. Meanwhile, at the National
Prosecuting Authority, director Shaun Abrahams has grown a
prison inmate’s fi ve o’clock shadow, perhaps in anticipation of
what awaits him on the other side. Forced by his own staff to
enable the Asset Forfeiture Unit to chase down billions stolen
by the Gupta family, and with his head on a block belonging
solely to an axe-wielding Ramaphosa, Abrahams has resorted
to the usual law faring to maintain his unmaintainable position.
Despite the dominant narrative, however, it can’t all be blamed on
Abrahams, who requires the results of an investigation in order to
formulate a case. In other words, he needs to be teed up by the
Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, or Hawks, who have
excelled at doing fuckall during the Zuma years, and were led by
a coterie of mouth breathers – Exhibit A: Berning Ntlemeza – who
were so absurdly corrupt that the entire notion of accountability
submitted to the gaps between the quanta and evaporated.
When the leaders of these two institutions are canned, and when
they’re replaced by Ramaphosa loyalists, Zuma’s enablers and
henchfolk are fi nished. Some will go to jail. Others won’t. As for
Zuma, Nguni cattle are unlikely to survive an afternoon in the
United Arab Emirates, so his agricultural pretensions may have
to fi nd another outlet.The last element of Ramaphosa’s attack was realised over the
weekend, and it’s laugh-out-loud funny the way it all turned out.
The establishment of the National Working Committee by the
NEC is key to how the ANC power play thrashes out in real time.
Provincial warlord David Mabuza, along with the “unity” ticket
within the NEC – really just a cobbled together combo meal of
Zuma loyalists and those trying to establish an alternative faction
that will eventually stand off against Team Ramaphosa – really did
seem to imagine they could stuff the NWC with their own people.
They failed, largely because they misunderstood how power,
at least in the fi rst stages of a political changeover, accrues so
considerably to the winner.
The fact that Zuma praise singers Bathabile Dlamini, Nomvula
Mokonyane and Tony fucking Yengeni managed to make it on to
anything but a prison roll is itself an indictment of the ANC – and
yet there they are, brooding their way through NWC meetings,
gumming up the works. But by and large, the winners and losers
now know where they stand, and the ANC’s decision-making
bodies belong to Ramaphosa. Which is to say, for the time being.
Because power windows often close as quickly they open.Zuma has found that out over the past several weeks. In the
highest levels of the ANC, such revelations do not seem to be a
cause for much concern.antithesis was the epic rot of the Zuma era. Ramaphosa told
a heat-stunned crowd that he wanted corruption wiped away,
and that he wanted punctuality to rule: every cadre in the ANC
would have to set their Breitlings not to Dubai time, but to CAT.
Cleanliness and effi ciency; technocracy to the rescue. The crowd
seemed to be buying it. It is told that the whirring of watch stems
could be heard as far north as Senegal.
Three prongs and a jail cell
We must ask: what has Ramaphosa’s approach been so far?
Eff ectively, it’s been a three-pronged attack, and you can almost
lip-read Pravin Gordhan’s tactics as he whispers them into
Ramaphosa’s ear.
One: clean up state-owned enterprises, most signifi cantly
the economic nuclear bomb better known as Eskom.
Two: Ramaphosa, in his capacity as deputy president, was
recently granted by the courts the responsibility of appointing
a sentient head of the National Prosecuting Authority, because
the country’s president was apparently “confl icted” when last
engaged in this process. So go ahead and do that.
Third: capture the decision-making bodies of the ANC which,
upsettingly, set policy for the entirety of South Africa, forever.
(If you think Ramaphosa is any diff erent to his predecessors
in substance, consider what he said to the attendees during
the weekend’s lekgotla: “We must reiterate that the ANC is the
strategic centre of power and that those deployed in government
receive their mandate from, and are accountable to, the
movement.” Not the people of South Africa. Not the institutions
that make up government. The “movement”.)
As far as Eskom is concerned, even Finance Minister Malusi
Gigaba, who used to spend a considerable amount of time in
a fantasy world in which the radical/reactionary dialectic of
Zumanomics made sense, understood that this was the black
hole in the middle of the South Africa-verse. Eskom sucked the
light – but more important, literally all of the money – into its
dark, dead soul. In his wanderings, Gigaba encountered in Public
Enterprise minister Lynn Brown a woman of spectacular avarice
and myopia, who was entirely disinterested in Eskom’s future so
far is it pertained to delivering electricity. For Brown, as it has
been for many hundreds of scumbags dating back to the earliest
days of South African democracy, Eskom was a bank vault that
could not be emptied. Fixing that entity was for saps – Eskom
was to be plundered until Jesus returned.
Freaking out completely, Gigaba looked around for help, and
all he heard was uBaba’s maniacal giggle echoing through the
halls of Luthuli House. But last Friday night, during a meeting
between Brown, Ramaphosa, Gigaba and Zuma, the new boss
insisted that the power utility would now fall under the purview of
a small team led by himself, along with the fi nance minister and
energy minister David Mahlobo. This is still very much a B-team,
but it did assemble a board of blue-chip business types, chaired
by jazzy Telcom CEO Jabu Mabuza, with an interim CEO in the
person of Phakamani Hadebe.
Once a key architect of the State Capture initiative, Gigaba was
always expected to be one of the fi rst to fl ip to Ramaphosa,
and that’s exactly what’s happened. In an interview on eNCA
with Karyn Maughn on Sunday, the fi nance minister spoke as if
possessed by the spirit of Pravin Gordhan (it was Sunday, after
all), and insisted that stolen state money must be claimed back,
and that generally every person involved in malfeasance must do
hard time. Gigaba, a political creature possessing immense acuity,
understands that a political switcheroo is a mock revolution, and
that if you hope to keep your head out of a bucket, it’s best to
stick with the winners.