Good, hard-working South Africans have long wanted Ramaphosa to do well, but they are beginning to think, with his protracted silence while he is clearly under attack, that he is ‘just like the rest’, writes justicemalala.
President Cyril Ramaphosa should watch the game of thrones that has unfolded this past week at 10 Downing Street carefully. What’s happened to Boris Johnson could happen to him too.
On Tuesday evening Johnson suffered a double blow when two of his most senior cabinet members, chancellor of the exchequer Rishi Sunak and health secretary Sajid Javid, resigned from their positions. They were not the only ones. Overnight, as Johnson desperately tried to plug the two “big beast” departures with political lightweights, more junior members of his team started jumping the sinking ship. By Wednesday afternoon several resignations had rocked Johnson cabinet.
Over the past week, however, Johnson got caught out in what seemed like a lie to cabinet colleagues and an attempt at a cover-up. The story goes back to 2017. Then, Conservative MP Chris Pincher was accused of sexual harassment. In 2019 he was made to leave the foreign affairs office after more reports of inappropriate behaviour.
They were caught out when one of the country’s former top civil servants, Lord McDonald, revealed that Johnson was indeed briefed “in person” about a “formal complaint” about Pincher’s conduct in 2019. This week Johnson conceded that he knew and still appointed the man. Even cabinet ministers close to him could not bear the stench of hypocrisy around him. Javid, one of the first two senior ministers to resign, on Wednesday called on all his cabinet colleagues to abandon Johnson.
Ramaphosa has a lot on his plate: children dying at taverns, a tanking economy, saboteurs in his intelligence services, an Eskom that’s near collapse, an ANC that is disintegrating fast, and so much else. These conditions make it easy for his detractors to play him as the villain with no consideration of their complicity in handing over the state to the Guptas and the narrow, corrupt, elite that stuffed itself in the 2010s.
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