February 10 2022 - The State of the Nation address held at the City of Cape Town City Hall, Cape Town, South Africa. Photo by David Harrison
President Cyril Ramaphosa needs “muscle” to resolve a credibility gap between his spoken words and actions, according to a panel of experts who scrutinised his Thursday State of the Nation address (Sona).
Richard Calland, an associate professor in public law at the University of Cape Town, told the forum hosted by the Mail & Guardian and nonprofit Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Cape Town on Friday, that Ramaphosa gave a “strong speech” but that “the president basically said ‘I do not trust my own government’,” given that he called in the help of the private sector.
The speech showed the president recognises “he needs more muscle around him if he is to stand any chance in closing the credibility gap between words and action”, Calland added.
Political analyst and research associate with the Institute for Global Dialogue, Sanusha Naidu, echoed Calland, saying the speech was “thin on substantive ‘hows’”.
She said that after the one hour mark into his speech, Ramaphosa had gone into “things that don’t necessarily give me (a) sense of how it is going to get implemented”, adding: “The biggest challenge the president has is the bureaucratic implementation … if it is not working out in the structures of government, in the structures at the three levels, particularly provincial and local, it is not going to make any difference.”
It all comes down to Ramaphosa’s ability to monitor, oversee and enforce strategy from the top, Calland said, arguing that any modern government needed a presidency whose people had “skill and muscle and intellectual capabilities”.
He said Ramaphosa’s address was somewhat of a start of a campaign as he prepares to seek a second term as leader of the ruling ANC at its elective conference in December.
“Given the ANC’s power they might still be in power in 2024, so we are still locked into the ANC,” says Calland, arguing that Ramaphosa was therefore South Africa’s best bet for a leader and “we need him to succeed [in December]”.
Foreign policy
Panellist Rebone Tau, the programme manager for political affairs at Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, said Ramaphosa’s address was significant not in what he said, “but what he did not say”.
Tau noted that this was the second Sona in which the president did not mention foreign policy despite having just come back from conflict-torn Mozambique where he met his counterpart, Filipe Nyusi, and where a South African soldier recently died in the line of duty.
Tebogo Edwin Radebe was killed during an ambush in December during an attack by insurgents in Mozambique, where South African soldiers are deployed as part of a regional mission.
Calland countered that Ramaphosa’s focus on domestic challenges was not surprising.
“We obviously want a global presence but that is not his preoccupation, it is the domestic crises and, of course, he has elections at the end of the year,” he said, adding that one significant international development was the R131-billion climate-finance agreement that aims to help South Africa’s transition to renewable energy, allowing it to systematically do away with coal.
Naidu said the president had not fully acknowledged other key events from a foreign policy perspective, for example regarding Covid-19 “vaccine diplomacy”.
“His understanding of foreign policy is theoretically very interesting but when it comes to practical implementation he is finding the difficulties because in the whole context of our domestic landscape it comes back to capabilities, efficiency [and] the kind of policy dynamics you want to see,” Naidu added.