Africa

Scandal hangs over Ramaphosa but risk of impeachment looks low

South Africa’s president faces fallout of report into his handling of robbery in watershed moment for him and ANC

South African president Cyril Ramaphosa: The report claims the approach he took to tackling a 2020 robbery of $580,000 from his Phala Phala game farm in Limpopo province may have violated the constitution and broken anti-corruption laws. Photograph: Gianluigi Guercia/AFP

Bill Corcoran's face
Bill Corcoran in Cape Town
Sun Dec 11 2022 - 15:12

The political future of South Africa’s embattled leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, appears secure in the short term even though his presidency remains mired in crisis over an inquiry’s findings on his role in the “Farmgate” scandal.

Although opposition parties are trying to launch the process to impeach Ramaphosa on Tuesday in the 400-member National Assembly, via a vote on whether to adopt the inquiry’s report and establish the full investigation it recommends, their chances of success appear slim.

In early December, the ruling African National Congress’s top decision-making body, the national executive committee (NEC), ordered the party’s 230 MPs to vote against adopting the report in the open ballot. As a result, opposition parties need 31 ANC politicians to go against the party line to reach the 201-MP threshold needed to pass their motion.

This is something independent political analyst Pearl Mncube does not believe will happen, so in her view the immediate threat of impeachment to Ramaphosa looks to have subsided for now. “I think the NEC’s order that ANC MPs vote against adopting the opposition parties’ motion gives us a clear picture of how the ballot will go,” she says.

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Mncube adds that “when the report was released [on November 30th], we got a sense of the divisions that exist in the ANC, but I think they are more likely to play out at the party’s elective conference than in parliament”.

Accusation of cover up

Produced by an independent panel of three legal experts, the inquiry’s preliminary report investigated how Ramaphosa handled the 2020 robbery of $580,000 from his Phala Phala game farm in Limpopo province. The scandal first erupted last June when former director general of the state security agency Arthur Fraser accused Ramaphosa of trying to cover up the theft, as well as of bribery, kidnapping and money laundering.

The report’s findings could prove to be a watershed moment for Ramaphosa’s administration, as it stated the approach he took to tackling the crime may have violated the constitution and broken anti-corruption laws. Many South Africans see the scandal and its fallout as a crisis of Ramaphosa’s own making: although he denies any wrongdoing and has taken the Phala Phala report on judicial review, calling for it to be set aside, he has yet to clear up key discrepancies in the version of events he submitted to the preliminary inquiry.

However, there are also strong indications the scandal is playing a major part in the ANC’s ongoing factional wars that are reaching a crescendo ahead of its five-yearly elective conference, which starts on December 16th. Fraser is a known key ally of former president Jacob Zuma and a faction in the ANC known as the radical economic transformation group.

Ramaphosa and his ANC backers had sidelined much of this cohort from their ruling party’s leadership positions as part of efforts to tackle endemic corruption in the movement that took hold under Zuma. To do this, he championed the introduction of a controversial “step aside” rule in the ANC that stated any leader charged with corruption, or who brought the party into disrepute, must leave their role until they have cleared their name.

Re-election bid

It now appears likely that Ramaphosa’s enemies in the ANC will try to use this rule at the conference this week to thwart his re-election bid, and retake control of the party at a time when he looked odds-on for another term. Prior to the report’s release, Ramaphosa had nearly double the nominations from ANC branches for the position as ANC president than his closest rival, the corruption-accused Zweli Mkhize.

Yet Mncube believes Ramaphosa still has enough clout in the ANC to win re-election despite the reputational damage the scandal has caused him because his main challengers “have many more skeletons in their closets” than he does.

“But you get a sense that more people are losing hope in Ramaphosa and the ANC because of this scandal,” she says. “So the real consequences of this scandal for the president and ruling party may only be felt at the next general election”.

Indeed, even if efforts to start impeaching Ramaphosa in parliament were thwarted by a united ANC on Tuesday, the scandal has given rise to at least four other independent investigations that could threaten his hold on power. These involve the public sector ombudsman, the South African Reserve Bank, the police and the ANC’s integrity commission. Adverse findings by any one of these could see Ramaphosa under renewed pressure to resign as early as next year.

Such a development would leave the ANC frantically searching for a new leader that is acceptable to the public ahead of a fast-approaching 2024 general election. Where they would find such a party official is not immediately clear.