President Cyril Ramaphosa and some of his cabinet members such as Ministers Tito Mboweni and Pravin Gordhan, are seemingly being made scapegoats by a dangerously corrupt element within the ruling party. The coalescing of those associated with state capture around Ace Magashule has seemingly defined its primary target as Ramaphosa and these two ministers.
This they do in a politically opportunistic fashion in order to project the New Dawn as a spectacular failure because, they allege, it disregards the ANC Nasrec Conference Resolutions. The red herrings in this regard are the policy resolutions on Nationalisation of SARB, Expropriation of Land without Compensation and Energy.
Accordingly, many have warned of a political Armageddon for Ramaphosa when the ANC meets in its mid-term National General Council (NGC) in June this year. The narrative goes that this NGC will be the beginning of the end of the Ramaphosa presidency. What this narrative misses though is that it is not President Ramaphosa who is failing the country at this moment, but the ANC itself.
If anything, the NGC will be the beginning of the end of the ANC if the latter fail to come up with workable economic policies and strategies that will take the country out of the current economic abyss.
It is our view that the ANC is currently stuck on what to do to address the debilitating economic situation in South Africa using the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) model as underpinned by the Freedom Charter economic objectives.
In this regard the Freedom Charter calls for profound changes in the economy such as drastic agrarian reform; widespread nationalisation of key industries to smash the grip of White monopoly capital on the country’s economy; and radical improvements in the conditions of living of the working people.