Devastation and Attempted Redemption

In the Ramaphosa epoch the state was fragile and continuously incapacitated, even if argued to be on track to better functionality, integrity and efficiency. The state in the heydays of ANC party political dominance had been plundered and institutionally disfigured. The damage had been inflicted largely, but far from exclusively, in the so-called ‘wasted’ decade of 2007 to 2017. This chapter considers the actions of trying to redeem the state from systemic corruption and extensive capture committed by entrenched forces of the previous ANC factional regime – and to do so while a continuously predator class of political elites remained in charge.

Parts of government had come almost to a standstill from the point when an ANC faction campaigned for Jacob Zuma to become ANC president. Mbeki-ists had resisted in vain as Zuma-ists occupied strategically important and resource-rich parts of the state. The ANC and its key organisational and government organs, such as the National Executive Committee, Cabinet and parliamentary caucuses, stood by Zuma far beyond the point of clarity about the damage unleashed. Cyril Ramaphosa was complicit in first accepting the ANC deputy presidency under Zuma and subsequently maintaining a prolonged silence while corruption flourished. He then reconsidered and, through his candidacy for the ANC presidency, volunteered for the task of undoing the damage. He had to work with an ANC whose problems had accumulated and worsened in many respects.

Most state institutions had continued working – in the ways of South African public sector culture of paper-pushing and contracting procurement from the new national bourgeoisie. Much public sector delivery continued to unfold, amid devastation wrought by corruption, capture and tolerance of incapacity among civil servants and politicians in public office. There was the unquantified knowledge that the amount and quality of delivery would have been better had the politicians and their associated public servants not been preoccupied so frequently with politics or with schemes to draw personal benefits from their public sector work. Many had been diverting public funds into paper contracts that saw transfers that benefited them alone, or vast amounts of facilitation fees being paid for no work, and contracts going to the tendering party that paid the best bribe to officials and politicians or retainer to the ANC.