[ad_1]
2019-07-22 07:45
In the era of the militarization of social media and the proliferation of false information, Ramaphosa will have to be much more intelligent to win hearts and minds upon waking, writes Adriaan Bbadon.
President Cyril Ramaphosa will likely survive the latest salvo of the Busisiwe Mkhwebane lawyer against him, but will have to do a serious introspection about who he is listening to and the strength of his forehead.
The leader of the EFF, Julius Malema, and I do not agree on many things these days, but I agree with the chief-in-chief that Ramaphosa should be concerned about his team of advisors.
There is a total war against Ramaphosa for his efforts to cope with the lost nine years of state capture under former President Jacob Zuma. He needs better protection.
In the era of the militarization of social media and the proliferation of false information, Ramaphosa will have to be much more intelligent to win hearts and minds upon waking.
The president announced Sunday night that he would urgently take Mkhwebane's conclusions against him. The majority of the lawyers who examined his report agree with Ramaphosa's opinion that the Québec Ombudsman has weak legal bases.
Even for this legal layman, it is clear that Mkhwebane is too infatuated by digging into the funding of the CR17 campaign while she was formally in charge of determining whether Ramaphosa had lied to Parliament on the 500,000 donation R $ that his campaign had received from the general manager of Bosasa, Gavin Watson.
She uses the famous Oilgate judgment to justify that, but her real reasons may be less noble. According to her report, it is clear that she is rubbing her hands for the main donors of the ANC Ramaphosa campaign to be revealed.
If Mkhwebane actually participates in a bigger riposte against the new Dawn of Ramaphosa, as the president has hinted on Sunday, she can hope that the publication of the names of donors will support the pro-Zuma narrative that Ramaphosa is captured by the big white company.
It will come as no surprise if wealthy (and black) businessmen make a donation to the Ramaphosa campaign. Can you blame them? Under Zuma, South Africa was on the precipice. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma was clearly able to continue Zuma's work with the help of the Guptas.
Imagine where we would have been if NDZ had emerged victorious from Nasrec; no commission Zondo, no Shamila Batohi, no direction of investigations; no Edward Kieswetter or new boards of directors at Eskom and Transnet.
Many people have seen in Ramaphosa's victory the only way to survive the ANC and the country. There can be no rational argument against this.
This is not an argument in favor of the obscene amounts of money that have been splashed by the campaigns of Ramaphosa and Dlamini – Zuma to win at Nasrec. Anthony Butler, biographer of Ramaphosa, calls it "the election of a billion rand".
Mkhwebane may not be right in saying that Ramaphosa should have declared donations to his campaign in Parliament, but the country and the ruling party should have serious conversations about this culture of favoritism.
Everyone who has attended an ANC conference know the bar that talks about envelopes and brown suitcases filled with money to buy votes. At Nasrec, I was reliably told that you could sell your accreditation badge as a delegate for up to 100,000 rand.
It's an inherently corrupt system and something that Ramaphosa and his comrades will have to repair if they want to clean up the entire state.
The other big lesson from the Bosasa saga is that the Ramaphosa campaign should never have solicited money from Watson, a man deeply involved in corruption and state capture.
Accepting the fact that Ramaphosa did not know who his fundraiser was about, it is shocking and scary to think that his main fundraisers and advisers did not know or were not willing to accept the Watson's dirty money.
Reports on the capture of the criminal justice system by Bosasa abound since 2006. How was it possible that no one in CR17 raised the red flag?
The Mkhwebane report is certainly not fatal, but it is an urgent reminder for Ramaphosa to strengthen its core if it wants to survive a decade.
– Bbadon is the editor of News24.
[ad_2]
Source link
