Dear DM168 readers,

While I write this week’s letter, the piet-my-vrous, red-crested robins, weavers and the pesky hadedas in our garden are all loudly interjecting in their early morning Conference of the Birds.

Outside the window of our little unit in a Pretoria residential complex, I have a beautiful view of the koppie in the Faerie Glen Nature Reserve, where  my friends and I often hike.

The quartzite koppie stands as majestically as it has for  2 billion years, in all its ancient, rugged modesty, keeping a sturdy presence on the Highveld plains.

As far as I can see the sky is mottled with cloud cover and has not fallen on my head.

But, yes, down the road in Arcadia north, on top of the equally rugged Meintjieskop, where Sir Herbert Baker’s African Acropolis, the Union Buildings stand, trouble is brewing. Again.

It brewed when the imposing building, carved out of sandstone by the hands of over a thousand local labourers and artisans, housed the poisoned heart of an unholy alliance between the British overlords and only one small segment of South Africa’s people, the Afrikaners.

It brewed when the pale men imbued with a scary superiority complex believed they were anointed by God to direct, dictate and ruin the lives of anyone lucky enough to have more melanin than them.

Within those walls of sandstone is where the racially exclusionary ideas and philosophies of prejudice festered that made our country hell to live in for most of us and a pariah state to the world from 1948 to 1993.

Trouble has brewed at the Union Buildings, as we all know and acutely experienced in more recent memory, since we eschewed our pariah status and became a properly representative democracy.

After a nostalgically brief moment of elation when Nelson Mandela led the men and women from the party we, the people voted to have their turn in Baker’s buildings, it’s been a rollercoaster ride of a few highs and increasingly more lows.

Since Mandela gently segued out of the seat of power and happily handed over the baton in 1999, every one of his successors in the ANC has fallen on the swords of their own hubris and the liberation party’s descent into a venal Machiavellian mess.

I speak here of Thabo Mbeki who assiduously turned around an economy from the wreck of the Nationalist Party’s rand-guzzling Bantustan and border war folly.

Apart from making the civil service professional, with the Batho-Pele ethos and  contributing to increasing the black middle class, Mbeki also formed the much-missed Scorpions, a specialised FBI-style unit of the National Prosecuting Authority, tasked with investigating and prosecuting high-level and priority crimes including organised crime and corruption.

His bizarre HIV/Aids denialism, which arguably led to the premature deaths of thousands, loyalty to fallen friends like Robert Mugabe and the first in a long line of corruptible ANC police commissioners, such as Jackie Selebi, his seeming aloofness, as well as his misjudgment of the strength of the mafia capture of the party he lived for, led to his unceremonious ousting before his second term ended.

Trouble has brewed to bubbling point at the Union Buildings when the ANC, the party we, the people voted into power, replaced Mbeki with the jovial, amenable, down-to-earth, cut-throat man of the people, Jacob Zuma. Read a summary of the Gupta leaks and the Zondo Commision findings to understand how the trouble Zuma and the ANC wrought on our country still lurks in every inch of our body politic now.

To understand the trouble the current occupant of the Union Buildings finds himself in, let me take you back to the year 2012.

On 13 April 2012, while Zuma and the ANC members of the alliance of the wounded he had brought to The Union Buildings were enjoying their turn to eat, Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa, former ANC secretary-general, NUM first general secretary, the ANC’s chief negotiator at Codesa and businessman, did what he loved most.

He forked out R15-million bidding for beautiful specimens of game at the Piet du Toit Game Breeders Auction for his Phala Phala game farm in Bela-Bela.

The only reason this news leaped out of the normal Farmers Weekly fare into the mainstream media was the fact that Ramaphosa bid an additional R19.5-million at the same auction for a single buffalo cow called Tanzania and her heifer calf sired by what those in the know say was an outstanding bull called Masai. He was outbid by Free State game farmer Jaco Troskie who paid R20-million for the cow.

I have always been a journalist and this kind of money handed out for a prized buffalo is just intangible to me. I am not, have never been, nor have I had any desire to be in the 1% of super-rich that Ramaphosa and Troskie float in.

Such disposable cash is not in the paygrades of most others in the middle class and is an insult to the millions buckling under searing poverty and hunger in our very unequal country.

In an interview with the late SAfm talk show host Xolani Gwala at the time, Ramaphosa apologised for making the bid.

“It is a mistake in the sea of poverty. I live in a community … The damage has been done, I will live with it,” he said.

Ramaphosa may have lived with the damage caused by his rich man’s burden and insensitivity to the plight of the majority, but he has not really learned from it.

Ramaphosa is a strutter in the stratosphere of the super-rich and powerful, truly oblivious to how the other side lives or how others might view him.

Ramaphosa’s hubris led him to believe that his rather vague explanation of how $580,000 (R8.7-million) came to be stashed under cushions in a spare room in his house on the Phala Phala game farm would be sufficient for the independent panel led by former chief justice Judge Sandile Ngcobo.

This is why he faces an impeachment hearing.

Our country is once again facing a crisis brought on by a member of the party we, the people voted in to power.

That that member is a darling of the rich whose stratosphere he strolls in, causes jitters in markets and the middle class. Many of them were banking their hopes on Ramaphosa but this was always a misplaced hope in my view as it does not take one flawed man but a whole party to move in the same direction for a country to be course corrected.

Read our lead story by Marianne Merten to get to the bottom of what all of this means and what we can expect from the impeachment process, if it indeed happens and if Ramaphosa does not resign before then.

Are we going to be okay? Dear readers, that’s up to you. One of my colleagues told me about a conversation she had with a Cameroonian Uber driver which was quite instructive. The driver said: “South Africans are like children always thinking your government will help you. The rest of us in Africa, have known for a long time, we have to help ourselves.” Cynics might say it is because other African countries are so messed up that so many of their citizens flee to South Africa, but nonetheless the driver does have a point. We need to stop putting all our hopes in the one basket of political solutions to all our problems.

We can help ourselves by voting people of integrity to occupy the Union Buildings during the next elections in 2024, but also by doing what each of us can do every day to fix what’s broken.

Meanwhile, if you really want to give your voting bones some practice, how about helping us at Daily Maverick to choose the annual Person of the Year, Villain of the Year, Grinch of the Year, Moegoe of the Year and many more by clicking here. Also don’t forget to write to me at heather@dailymaverick.co.za about your views on the state of our nation and whatever else you have on your minds.

Yours in defence of truth,

Heather

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for R25 at Pick n Pay, Woolworths, Exclusive Books and airport bookstores. For your nearest stockist, please click here.