Renson Mwakandana
South Africans 🇿🇦 are waiting to hear if President Cyril Ramaphosa will quit amid a complicated and highly political scandal involving animals, a sofa, and the theft of tens of thousands (and maybe millions of US dollars) of money.
Now, a meeting of the African National Congress (ANC), the country’s ruling party, which is slated to take place in the coming days, will determine a lot of things.
Some of ANC’s forces of chaos might be trying to remove Mr. Ramaphosa in order to hold on to their loot and avoid going to jail, according to Mr. Ramaphosa’s most ardent supporters, who portray this as an all-or-nothing struggle between a decent man desperately trying to clean up a corrupt nation and the forces of chaos.
The play was compared to Shakespeare’s Henry V by one critic, who exhorted Mr. Ramaphosa to “stiffen the sinews” and struggle to clear his name. There is no question that the case against Mr. Ramaphosa was politically motivated, at least initially.
A well-known political competitor with ties to the corrupt former president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, dramatically unveiled claims that Mr. Ramaphosa’s opulent Phala Phala game farm had lost millions of dollars buried under a sofa, and that there had been a police cover-up.
The president, a successful businessman and former symbol of the liberation movement who Nelson Mandela had favored to replace him, loftily asserted that he was innocent.
However, the issue has persisted, and as new information and denials have come to light over time, even some of his admirers have admitted that Mr. Ramaphosa and his advisers handled the situation badly.
Nomboniso Gasa, a political analyst said, “There are questions that he has not been able to answer… about these huge sums of cash. He’d told us he’d put all these [businesses] in blind trust. I think he was very clumsy and careless and out of touch.
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EX-PRESIDENT JACOB ZUMA SEEKS DONATIONS FOR LEGAL FEES
