Johannesburg – When the songstress Sade wrote the song Smooth Operator, she couldn’t have had someone like our president in mind.
How could she?
Her song only came out in 1984, while our president was in the trenches, building the nascent National Union of Mineworkers.
But his recent performance at the Zondo Commission was mercurial.
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He was in his element. What needed to be said, he said it.
What didn’t need to be said, he left unsaid. What needed remembering, he remembered.
A better emissary, the ANC will not find; for when days are this dark, and friends are this few, great leaders are fewer.
It is in this complex context, that we must situate our president’s narrative about the five options that were open to him at the height of state capture.
In my fertile imagination, his five options were reminiscent of Robert Frost’s “the road not taken” – except that the president substituted five roads for Frost’s original two.
Picture a man approaching an intersection where five roads fork off in different directions.
His eyes track each road at a time, down the valley, up the hill, through the forest, across the village, as far as eyes could see.
For four long and lonely years, 2014- 2018, he stood at the crossroads, his options weighing heavily on him.
The first road that beckoned led to resignation destination.
It was decorated with “big headlines” and “praise from many quarters”. But our president would not be bamboozled.
He knew the impact of headlines would be short-lived and the praises would soon melt away.
Like the central character in Theodor Roosevelt’s famous speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, our president elected to become “the man in the arena”, until he could put an end to state capture one day.
The second road stretched out and twisted across the landscape like a reticulated python. This was the career-limiting road of confrontation, a road laced with an overdose of truth.
“Too much of a good thing is bad for you,” as they say.
Fortunately, the president approached everything in moderation, for there was “a limit to how confrontational [he] could be” without curtailing his ability to put an end to state capture one day. When he surveyed the third road, our president was visibly nauseated.
It was a road infested with the stench of acquiescence. To take that road “would have been a violation of my principles and a profound betrayal”, he said.
Indeed, had he acquiesced, he would have never had the opportunity to put an end to state capture one day.
Road number four was chilly, eerie and irritating. It reverberated with the deafening sounds of silence within which some people bowed and chowed with the Gupta gods they made.
But our president vowed and prayed for the right moment so he could strike a fatal blow against state capture one day. And so, not so long ago, when confronted with the five roads that diverged to different destinations, our president took the road most travelled, road number five.
And that has made all the difference.
Had he not been elected deputy president of the ANC, and had he quit as deputy president of the republic, he might have never lived to fight state capture one day.
As poet Violet Fane noted long ago, “all [good] things come to those who wait”. For seven lean years (2012-2018), our president waited until he and his comrades had acquired the power, without which they could never have confronted state capture one day. At one point when the commission evidence leaders had exhausted him, our president suggested that being in the executive was a sacrifice.
But surely, serving his country as selflessly as he has done so far, “is no sacrifice, no sacrifice, at all” – as Elton John has sung so beautifully.
It’s no sacrifice, it’s a privilege. Fellow South Africans, come then, let us await with glee, the commission report.
Armed with this report, our president will be unstoppable in putting an end to state capture one day.
And by the way, without President Ramaphosa and like-minded people at the helm, we might have missed out on load-shedding, junk status, the highest unemployment rate ever, PPE corruption and the July 2021 looting spree.
But things could have been worse, Joe.
• Prof Maluleke is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship. Follow him on Twitt er @ProfTinyiko
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