Fact-checking the inaccuracies, half-truths and duplicity in the latest presidential newsletter

Daily Maverick

2 days ago

President Cyril Ramaphosa's latest newsletter is probably too long for most fellow citizens to make time to read, but it contains so many inaccurate, misleading and downright false statements that unpacking some of them is a worthwhile exercise.
In the newsletter, the President refers to a statement made by the US State Department last year, in the context of a climate summit, and quotes the glowing terms from it:
'Last year's country Investment Climate Summit published by the US State Department highlights South Africa being an attractive investment hub, citing key factors such as deep and well-regulated capital markets, strengths in manufacturing stable institutions, an independent judiciary and robust legal sector, respect for the rule of law, a mature financial and services sector, and experienced local partners.'
The President does not mention that these words are the work of the Biden administration, since replaced, in January 2025, by the Trump administration. Worse still, he leaves out the following portion of the State Department report for obvious reasons not unrelated to its gloomy and critical content:
'However, South Africa continues to suffer the effects from a 'lost decade' in which economic growth stagnated, hovering at zero percent pre-Covid, largely due to corruption and economic mismanagement, and a slow economic rebound post-Covid amid endemic logistics and energy crises. One of the biggest challenges to investment is persistent 'load shedding', South Africa's term for nationwide scheduled rolling blackouts.
'Other challenges include policy uncertainty, lack of regulatory oversight and enforcement, state-owned enterprise (SOE) drain on the fiscus, corruption, violent crime, labor unrest, lack of basic infrastructure and government service delivery, and lack of skilled labor.
'Moody's, Fitch, and S&P have affirmed South Africa's credit rating as stable but rate South Africa's sovereign debt as sub-investment grade. In February 2023, the Financial Action Task Force listed South Africa as a jurisdiction under increased monitoring, known as the 'grey list', to address deficiencies in its regime to counter money laundering and terrorist financing (AML/CFT). South Africa will remain under increased monitoring until it completes its action plan to strengthen its AML/CFT regime.'
SA remains on that grey list and will likely languish there until necessary reforms to the criminal justice administration, needed to capacitate it to counter money laundering and terrorist financing, are effected.
The Ramaphosa administration shows no urgency in this regard, despite the fact that while SA is on the grey list, borrowing (currently at an all-time high) will remain prohibitively expensive. SA services its debt at present at a cost of R1.2-billion a week, an amount the taxpayers can ill afford.
Rule of law
Ramaphosa suggests that his government shows fealty to the rule of law. He does not mention the recent trenchant criticism by Bonang Mohale, chancellor of the University of the Free State:
'The great problem for South Africa is rampant greed. [It] is essentially a problem for the once glorious African National Congress that has morphed into an organised crime syndicate, primarily because for a solid 30 years of our democracy, they held the absolute majority power in everything that matters.'
'Organised crime syndicates' by definition show no discernible regard for the rule of law. Fealty to the rule of law implies respect for property rights; indeed, that respect is built into the definition of the rule of law favoured by the World Justice Project. At the most basic level, it entails that:
' The rule of law ensures property rights by providing a framework of laws, institutions, and community commitment that protects those rights. It guarantees that everyone has the right to own property, both individually and collectively, and that no one can be arbitrarily deprived of their property. This framework also ensures that if property is taken, it is done in accordance with the law and with just compensation.'
The abomination that is the new Expropriation Act envisages expropriation with nil compensation. The Constitution envisages 'just and equitable compensation' upon expropriation in section 25 of the Bill of Rights.
The nil compensation does not have to be just and equitable on any reasonable interpretation of the new law. This renders it unconstitutional. It also exposes the government's lack of appreciation of the meaning of the rule of law.
The Constitution itself regards the rule of law as supreme. Any attempt to dilute the rule of law has to have a 75% majority vote in Parliament, not the simple majority that passed the Expropriation Act.
Independent judiciary
Ramaphosa claims that there is an independent judiciary in SA. Has he forgotten the evidence he gave before the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture? There he revealed that the Bench in SA is regarded by the ANC as a site of cadre deployment. There is no better way to capture a judiciary than to deploy loyal cadres to serve on it. That is the death knell of independence.
This ambiguous passage appears in the newsletter:
'President Trump agreed that the US should continue playing a key role in the G20, including attending the G20 Leaders' Summit in Johannesburg later this year, where South Africa will hand over the presidency of the G20 to the US.'
Does Ramaphosa mean that Donald Trump is coming to the wreckage of Johannesburg later this year, or merely that the US will continue playing its key role in the G20 by sending a representative to Johannesburg? The answer is anyone's guess. Time will tell.
There is more Orwellian doublespeak in this presidential observation:
'We were able to update US officials on the ongoing structural reform process underway to improve the ease of doing business and facilitate a favourable investment climate.'
Every cautious would-be investor is acutely aware of the high violent crime levels in SA and also regards the rampant corruption, about which Bonang Mohale waxes so eloquent, as reasons to avoid making new investments in SA.
Crime and corruption remain at unacceptably high levels and not enough is being done to address these barriers to new investment from which new jobs will flow.
As long ago as 2011 the Constitutional Court ordered that a single body outside of the control of the executive (which Ramaphosa now heads) should be established to deal with corruption. No such body has been set up 14 years later.
The binding nature of the court findings and the legal need to implement the criteria it set are ignored by a government that is content to allow State Capture, tenderpreneurism and the cosy type of comprador-capitalism that BEE laws and regulations have created (this despite recent polling that indicates that more than four in five of the SA population favour merit appointments over race quotas.)
There is simply no political will to implement the 2011 judgment properly. This attitude is not indicative of fealty to the rule of law, nor of any real desire to create an investor friendly climate in SA.
A great deal of new investment is necessary to attain secure peace, sustainable development on the embattled economic front and shared prosperity in which those genuinely previously disadvantaged enjoy the fruits of their currently hollow liberation.
Progress bedevilled
Before the formation of the Government of National Unity (GNU), the ANC and its tripartite alliance partners, the SACP and Cosatu, ruled the roost and created the BEE architecture that has so bedevilled progress in SA. The laws and policies in place have been trenchantly criticised by Professor William Gumede, but they are persisted in by the ANC element of the GNU.
By now it ought to be screamingly apparent to any sentient observer that the BEE system has not served the constitutional purpose for which it was intended.
The provisions of section 9 of the Bill of Rights contemplate redress via legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons or categories of persons disadvantaged by unfair discrimination. All that BEE has in fact achieved is the enrichment of ANC cadres and their friends in business.
Those genuinely disadvantaged continue to languish in poverty. This fact is illustrated by the increase in the Gini Index, which is now the highest in the world among the 130 countries that produce a Gini Index and considerably higher than it was in SA when democracy dawned.
The BEE system does not properly serve the purpose for which it was created. It should be scrapped in favour of the economic empowerment for the disadvantaged — the EED system proposed by the SA Institute of Race Relations.
Whether the GNU will be able to break the shackles on progress that is in place due to the ANC fealty to its National Democratic Revolution (NDR) remains to be seen. The NDR is deeply and darkly inconsistent with constitutional principles, but the abandonment of the NDR would not suit that 'organised crime syndicate' to which Mohale refers.
The private member's Bills introduced by the co-chair of the Justice Portfolio Committee, Glynnis Breytenbach, envisaging a new Chapter Nine Anti-Corruption Commission that will be set up in a constitutionally compliant way to deal with corruption, are currently undergoing processing in the parliamentary back office.
Before the GNU dawned, Breytenbach was the DA's shadow minister of justice. Before that, she was a senior prosecutor, and she knows the National Prosecuting Authority inside out. Her suggested reforms deserve accelerated parliamentary debate and consideration.
The DA and AfriForum have separately challenged the constitutionality of the Expropriation Act in litigation currently pending. New BEE regulations are similarly being challenged for want of constitutionality, also by the DA. There is furthermore a plethora of constitutional litigation around the National Health Insurance legislation.
If the government that Ramaphosa leads was true to the clear intentions of the Constitution and showed greater fealty to the rule of law, these litigious efforts would be unnecessary, the criticisms would be taken to heart, the State Department's reservations recorded above, but omitted from his latest newsletter, would be taken more seriously and would be acted upon rather than omitted from the newsletter. DM