South Africa updates
Sign up to myFT Daily Digest to be the first to know about South Africa news.
President Cyril Ramaphosa told South Africa’s public graft inquiry that a legacy of corruption posed an “existential” threat to his party, as he defended his decision to act as Jacob Zuma’s deputy during years when the former leader’s allies looted the state.
During two days of testimony at the high-profile hearing, Ramaphosa, who replaced Zuma in 2018, said the ruling African National Congress was at “a watershed moment” in a struggle to uproot corruption.
Ramaphosa was the final substantive witness before the inquiry that, for the past three years, has been examining the nation’s worst post-apartheid graft scandal under president Zuma, who led the country for nine years from 2009.
The ANC, which has held power since 1994, “suffered quite a lot of loss of support because of corruption”, Ramaphosa said on Thursday. “For us it is an existential challenge. For us to continue existing we need to renew ourselves.”
The stakes were underlined last month when Zuma’s imprisonment for defying a summons to appear at the inquiry sparked violent unrest that led to more than 330 deaths and wrecked businesses and infrastructure vital to South Africa’s economy.
Dozens of witnesses at the inquiry have implicated Zuma in the “capture” of state appointments and contracts for private gain, particularly involving the once powerful Gupta business family.
Institutions from the revenue service to the police and prosecutors were damaged by the widespread corruption. The Guptas, who left South Africa after Zuma lost power, deny any wrongdoing.
Earlier in his testimony, Ramaphosa said that, as Zuma’s deputy president from 2014, he opted “not to resign, not acquiesce and not to be confrontational — but to work with others in the executive to resist abuses”, and ultimately to gain the ANC’s leadership. Now as president he said he still met resistance from those who had benefited from the looting of state coffers under Zuma.
Ramaphosa’s promises for renewal in the party, however, have begun to wear thin for many South Africans, especially after last month’s violence, triggered by the ANC’s power struggle.
Amid growing evidence that Zuma supporters planned what Ramaphosa had called a “failed insurrection”, he said on Thursday that the violence may have been sparked, in part, by former members of a rogue unit within South Africa’s state security agency who remain loyal to the ex-president.
The inquiry had previously heard that, under Zuma, the unit was given access to arms despite a lack of vetting and was used to target his political opponents.
The state security agency — the government department responsible for civilian intelligence operations — was placed under Ramaphosa’s direct oversight in a cabinet reshuffle last week in a sign of his battle to bring it under control.
Ramaphosa, on Thursday, called the politicisation of the security services under his predecessor a “lapse”, similar to how he has described the rot in other institutions during the past 10 years as ANC mistakes or mishaps.
Paul Pretorius, the evidence leader for the inquiry, who was questioning Ramaphosa, said that the undermining of the security services “could hardly be called a lapse”. It had been “a concerted exercise of state governance and executive control”, he added.
