Hello, China: In the run-up to 2024, Ramaphosa & Co come out swinging, challenging our basic constitutional rights

30 Nov 2023

The injunction by President Cyril Ramaphosa that South Africans must be more like the Chinese — ‘never badmouth your country’ — and his claim that public criticism of his government is severely ‘lopsided’ may be revealing as to his state of mind/understanding of the current political flows. It suggests that he has no concept of how difficult the lives of people are. Only someone who lives in the warm, expensive embrace of the VIP Protection Unit could make such an ignorant claim.

On Tuesday, BusinessLIVE reported that over the weekend, President Cyril Ramaphosa had compared the public criticism his government receives here to the situation in China.

He told a community meeting in Durban:

“In China, nearly everyone is a messenger — every Chinese is a messenger for their country, they never badmouth their own country. Never badmouth your country.”

He also said that:

“Here, some people have made it a sport to badmouth the country, to say all sorts of negative things, and we say we need to be patriotic and acknowledge that we have challenges and problems. But at the same time [we] say that our love for this country is much more important than the negativity, so therefore we must be positive about SA. That is the only way this country can move forward.”

There is much to consider in this.

Politically, it may be a sign of the unhappiness he may feel with the criticism of his government. Literally every hour of the day people publicly express their frustration with his Cabinet’s performance, and the ANC.

The failures of the ANC are regularly discussed on talk radio and social media. At the same time, the huge frustrations many people feel about the ANC, and the disappointment they feel with him personally, are no longer hidden, even by his erstwhile followers who feel betrayed by the ANC, and by Ramaphosa personally.

There is no denying that his programme of “renewal” has proven to be a failure.

There is also a personal element to this. Ramaphosa himself failed to act against people who have Zondo Commission findings against them. What’s more, he has chosen to include some of them in his executive.

He obviously may find the personal nature of some of the criticism levelled against him to be quite frustrating.

But Ramaphosa must be aware that comparing our situation to China will invite strong criticism.

We are a democracy. He has a more than passing acquaintance with the document which enshrines the right to freedom of expression. To compare that to China, where there is no freedom of speech, and mounting evidence that one person, President Xi Jinping, controls the society, is to ask for trouble.

Some people will claim Ramaphosa sure sounds as though he would prefer to lead a country that is not a democracy.

One of his key promises has been that his term was a break with the corruption that occurred during the “nine wasted years” (his term) of former president Jacob Zuma.

How striking it is then that these China-loving comments are so close to something Zuma once said, when he was president. In 2017, just weeks before the ANC conference that saw Ramaphosa running against Zuma’s preferred candidate, Zuma said:

“Attacking South Africa and bad-mouthing the country when [it] is most vulnerable is irresponsible, especially if done by South Africans themselves”.

However, perhaps the most problematic part of Ramaphosa’s comments is that they suggest he does not understand how life has changed for the worse for many people.

Crime has jumped dramatically, leading many to live lives of daily fear. The construction mafia is so brazen that its representatives will even walk into the mayoral complex in Cape Town and literally demand hundreds of millions of rands worth of contracts.

Transnet currently cannot process the cargo of ships currently waiting at the outer anchorage of Pier 2 in Durban Harbour. This is after the leadership of Transnet, appointed during the Ramaphosa administration, had to resign because they had failed.

And, of course, Eskom had to implement Stage 6 load shedding, again. On top of it, Minister of Electricity Kgosientsho Ramokgopa’s claim of pending improvements was revealed by Eskom to be a lie. Awkward…

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-11-27-eskom-contradicts-ramokgopa-forecasts-more-crippling-blackouts-over-the-coming-months/

Youth unemployment is now so bad that many have legitimate fears of the social unrest it could create.

In the Eastern Cape, children are literally starving to death.

It is likely that many voters will believe the person who leads the government that presides over such a disaster should be a fair target for criticism.

However, Ramaphosa’s comments are not being made in a vacuum. And there is some evidence that he and other ANC leaders are seeking to provoke certain fights as political issues for next year’s elections.

Ramaphosa’s comments come after Presidency Minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni claimed that the private sector was trying to “engineer the collapse” of the government.

This was after the deal struck between the Competition Commission and British-based bank Standard Chartered that saw the bank paying a fine of R42-million for its role in the manipulation of the rand.

Ntshavheni’s comments drew this response from Business Leadership SA CEO Busisiwe Mavuso:

“The government does not need the business sector’s help to run the country into the ground. They do it very well on their own, due to their own clumsiness, incompetence and the system of cadre deployment.”

Instead of backing down, Ntshavheni claimed that some of the criticism of her comments was based on the “male chauvinism that bedevils the media”.

At the same time, it appears the government’s relationship with organised business is also being strained by the ANC’s insistence on making no changes to the NHI Bill.

The Bill was adopted by the Health Committee of the National Council of Provinces last week with no changes. Even proposals from the national Health Department were ignored.

This is likely to lead to court action, as business groups and others say that the Bill in its current form will destroy the health system if it is implemented.

It may be that ahead of next year’s elections, the ANC is looking for some useful enemies.

This has happened in the past. In 2016, while leading an ANC election campaign, Zuma said he “did not understand” black people who voted for the DA.

It was a fairly transparent attempt to racialise the elections. But the power of that kind of campaigning may no longer be so effective.

Instead, the ANC may be looking for a proxy for race, and claiming to stand up for poor people against big business may be very helpful.

That would be despite the fact the current ANC government is giving more power to the private sector than any government before it.

Of course, Ramaphosa may have just made these comments in passing; he may say that in fact he meant very little by them.

But this may be a sign, an important sign, that he and other leaders in his government simply do not understand what is happening on the ground.

And have no idea how tough life is for most of our people. DM

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