Ramaphosa runs out of time as ANC turns 108

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has in the last few days been in Northern Cape province ahead of this weekend’s celebrations marking ruling African National Congress (ANC) founding 108 years ago.

The drought-stricken province was experiencing its first significant rains in five years as Ramaphosa met residents of far-flung parts of this largely dry and semi-arid part of the country.

Welcome as they were, the rains only highlighted how undeveloped the region remains, some 25 years after the end of apartheid. With up to a third of the animals in the region killed by drought, joblessness in some parts is 80-90 per cent.

Some commentators saw the irony of Ramaphosa muddying his shoes as he made his way through rural communities where there was an air of expectation and impatience over what he was going to do to address issues affecting ordinary South Africans.

Services or lack thereof, remained high on the communities’ next-thing-to-do lists for Ramaphosa. Many small communities and towns have no running water for reasons of drought and lack of infrastructure.

With high unemployment come social dislocation, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence and crime.

Northern Cape residents, many so-called coloureds of mixed-race, have been telling Ramaphosa that while they back ANC, they want change.

In the large towns and cities, Ramaphosa has been under pressure as the country goes through yet another round of load-shedding power cuts.

The negative effects of the outages have compounded Ramaphosa’s embarrassment over his now three times broken pre-Christmas pledge that there would be no more blackouts until at least the second week of January.

An ageing fleet of coal-fired power plants and possibly also sabotage are blamed for the latest outages. Ramaphosa’s union allies are unhappy with his plans to bring private enterprise into the power production business, hence the sabotage claims.

Nevertheless, he intends opening up the independent renewable power market, a point re-emphasised during his walk-about in the region where there is – as he pointed – “enough sun and wind to support the descript, fossil fuel-based national grid”.

Given the country’s shaky economy, which faces an imminent downgrade to junk investment status, the debt load of the failing national power utility amounting to $33.2 billion and its need for ongoing life-support from the treasury, Ramaphosa has a tough road ahead in getting South Africa back to work.

With another 800,000 school  graduates entering the job market this month or chasing a reducing number of tertiary education places, Ramaphosa’s jobs-creation drive has gone backwards.

The necessary cut to excess jobs in the civil service and poorly run state-owned enterprises (SOEs) will increase joblessness in the short-term but must be made to avoid a ratings downgrade.

Indications are that 2019 growth will be negative after power outages in the latter part of the year put the brakes on budding investment and possible growth.

Ramaphosa has much strengthened his position within ANC, including in the Northern Cape.

Now there are calls by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) for SOE minister Pravin Gordhan to resign.

Even Ramaphosa’s innocuous response to the outages in suggesting a more rapid move into renewable energy sources is being opposed by unions on grounds that this will mean part privatisation of power production.

And they oppose Ramaphosa and Gordhan’s plans to unbundle Eskom into three business units, saying it would lead to retrenchment.

But the president has no alternative: to delay is allow disaster and to act is to alienate a key component of his party’s support base.

The alternative is much worse – to let the country slide into financial ruin under the watch of the oldest liberation movement on the continent, thereby ensuring its relegation by voters to the trash-heap of history.

In a preview of his weekend address, Ramaphosa said 108 years ago, the lives of black South Africans were terrible.

Much has changed but much still remains the same. As some of those on his campaign trail point out,  Ramaphosa has been in power for close to two years but the country is still in crisis.

There is no more time. A failure to be bold now and outline a workable future, including some crucial how-to elements, will not be met well by the long-suffering but increasing impatient people.