Cash-filled cushions could sink South African party

Once upon a time (about four years ago), Cyril Ramaphosa was seen as South Africa's last, best hope. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the leadership of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) had passed from the wise and heroic Nelson Mandela to the intellectual, but ineffectual, Thabo Mbeki to the corrupt and ignorant Jacob Zuma.

But in 2018, the fractured and demoralized ANC pulled itself together, remembered its purpose and replaced Zuma as president with Cyril Ramaphosa. Ramaphosa had a long record of activism in the struggle against apartheid. He was a former trade union leader, and he was so rich he didn't need to be corrupt.

For a while it went well. The economy didn't grow much and unemployment stayed very high, but Zuma's chief cronies fled abroad, others were charged with various crimes and even Zuma wound up in jail.

But then, two years ago, there was a burglary at Ramaphosa's wildlife game farm.

Nobody heard about it at the time because Ramaphosa didn't mention it publicly. That's understandable because the burglars allegedly found $4 million in cash hidden in cushions on his sofa. That's not a good look for a president who stood for fighting corruption, so no report was made to the police. Ramaphosa just swallowed the loss.

That's not as crazy as it sounds: Ramaphosa is one of the richest men in South Africa, and $4 million is less than one per cent of his wealth. He could just be trying not to draw attention to it.

But then, early this month, Arthur Fraser, former head of South Africa's intelligence agency, lodged a criminal complaint with the police about the affair. Fraser said Ramaphosa's presidential protection unit had tracked down the burglars, kidnapped and interrogated them, and then bribed them to keep quiet about the cash.

Maybe Ramaphosa was just trying to protect his reputation as a man of the people, but even so he would have been breaking the law.

This comes at the wrong time for Ramaphosa, who faces a leadership challenge in the ANC in December. His anti-corruption campaign within the party has not prospered, and Zuma's supporters staged riots that killed hundreds when he was jailed. Now, Zuma's out of jail, and Ramaphosa is tarred with the same corruption brush.

There's a lot that's wrong with this story. Fraser is a close ally of Zuma. Ramaphosa holds regular cash auctions of his prize cattle and game animals at his farm, but why would he hide the cash in pillows? Tax avoidance? If he wants to avoid taxes, he has lawyers aplenty.

The burglary and the source and timing of the complaint smell like a political sting. Nevertheless, Ramaphosa is in deep trouble.

The object of the sting would have been to highlight Ramaphosa's unexplained wealth. He probably didn't break the law to get it, like Zuma did, but he didn't inherit it and he didn't earn it by hard work. He just got paid huge sums to sit on boards and invested the proceeds wisely.

Ramaphosa got on those boards as part of the ANC-sponsored Black Economic Empowerment program, one of whose purposes was to provide a reliable, low-profile income stream for the party. Most of the party's supporters were very poor, so the BEE appointees were expected to donate much of their large incomes to the ANC.

It's less lurid than Zuma's route to great wealth via partnership with Indian entrepreneurs in a project of state capture, but both men's riches come from their ties to the ANC. To the average voter, the two men will look exactly the same.

That is why the ANC probably will lose its majority in Parliament in the 2024 election, after 30 years in power. High time, really, even though nobody knows what's coming out of the box next.