Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - South Africans are watching whether this State of the Nation Address (Sona) will demonstrate a more gradual transition from a governing party to the opposition as a state of mind – an exhaustion of the will to govern and a dissolution of the discipline necessary to get work done into factional rancour.
That journey precedes an election defeat and makes one more likely.
Will this Sona make more ANC-SACP Cosatu members lose hope of victory in accomplishing electoral promises?
Will it reveal a leader in Ramaphosa who has run out of inducements to loyalty to see through the New Dawn project that ushered him into office?
Will it expose failed attempts to show strength, advertising weakness instead?
Voters smell decay and recoil from the source. Even the general supporters of the Ramaphoria wave start to anticipate defeat as euthanising mercy.
They will measure in Ramaphosa’s address how far down that path has the ANC government travelled. They will search and identify the point of no return.
Most ANC leaders comfort themselves that little of the present was foreseen in the past, which suggests that they have not fixed in their future unfulfilled expectations and the inevitable electoral decimation.
They hold on to the belief that Ramaphosa is a president who wants us to see him as a break from the past failures of the ANC government.
The trouble is that his speech is likely to demonstrate once more that he is leading a party that cannot escape the past failures to deliver on election promises, including fighting corruption and inefficiency in government.
The adage “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” hangs like former president Jacob Zuma’s portrait over Ramaphosa’s agenda, disrupting his attempts to reset the narrative even after securing a second term last December as party president.
Indecisiveness has already sucked out of the room the oxygen of the Union Building’s plan to report convincingly on the country’s progress.
It sank in that the anticipated Cabinet reshuffle and measures to curb rolling electricity blackouts will not match earlier promises meant to define Ramaphosa’s first 100 days in office.
And so the president will not be out of the woods when he addresses the nation because we will be watching him answer questions about whether he misled us during the previous addresses when he promised to cut government red tape and create millions of jobs.
For the public, the ANC looks like a party that has become too complacent at all levels of government.
Politicians in several municipalities are wreathed in a sense of entitlement that leads to unethical behaviour as they jostle for political power and access to public resources.
An increasingly unpopular ANC government looks to have lost its sense of what to do with power, including as an opposition party in some municipal councils. It lacks the initiative to push its ideas.
Ramaphosa’s role is to report on the state of our nation as accurately as possible, and he is not solely responsible for the failings of figures in his party. Nor was Jacob Zuma.
But the tide of scandal ended his career.
Such is the panic in the ANC that what remains of Ramaphosa’s popularity set pulses racing when party chairperson Gwede Mantashe warned members. He observed that “Ramaphosa is more popular than the ANC, and if we want to win elections, we must not even tolerate the idea of removing him.”
This time the president will find himself in a political hole, and his previous pleas for time to put the house in order are unlikely to change the negative attitudes of many people.
Earlier in his presidency, he promised to earn the nation’s trust.
But instead of building reserves of public confidence, Ramaphosa seems determined to squander what little he already has by delaying making and acting on important decisions that are within his power to make.
There is a growing sense that unless the ANC government implements drastic measures to improve the lives of most South Africans, it will significantly lose electoral support.
Eventually, it will be forced into an opposition party role during this year’s by-elections and after next year’s national and provincial elections. Indeed, governing parties do not become opposition parties overnight, but gradually lose trust when even the public mood on the president’s address is lukewarm.
Opposition politicians intone the same mantra to ward off complacency in holding the government accountable. We can expect to hear that same mantra when they debate Ramaphosa’s speech. They are most likely to speak as if they were spectators in the audience while the country falls into ruin.
They cannot agree on what good government involves for long enough to put it on display in municipal councils under their control.
There is a faction in the opposition that thinks getting in and out of coalition governments excluding the ANC – even to the extent of electing dishonest politicians to senior positions in municipal councils – has not been a disaster, but too much of a good thing that the electorate found hard to digest.
There is also a camp that thinks the undue interference of national politicians in the governance of municipal councils is blameless. Yet it is at the heart of the collapse of service delivery to the public, even though cowards and traitors traduce this camp.
That makes a significant cohort of politicians in political parties whom independent candidates must replace in 2024.
It is not a unique affliction nor a syndrome that we can resolve under the current pure proportional representation electoral system.
The obstruction is no mere question of a deflated Ramaphoria project or misdirection in the ANC.
It goes deeper, entwined and embedded in the guts of the party-dominated electoral system that we cannot loosen without electoral intervention that meaningfully involves independent candidates.
It needs voters to flush a lot of unhelpful political party elites out of power so that we can elect leaders to turn around and improve the state of our nation.
Nkosikhulule is a researcher, analyst and human right activist.
Cape Times
* The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.