For almost four years, President Cyril Ramaphosa managed to dodge accountability for the Phala Phala scandal.
On Friday, the Constitutional Court – after gifting him an 18-month political reprieve through delay – at last pulled the judicial rug from beneath his feet.
In an extraordinary three-way split decision, the full 11-member bench nevertheless reached the same effective outcome: Ramaphosa must now face the parliamentary impeachment process that the ANC used its majority to smother in December 2022.
Impeachment process ahead
The judgment does not mean he will be impeached. Indeed, that remains highly unlikely.
But it does mean Ramaphosa will have to publicly engage with the findings of the independent panel, appointed by parliament and headed by former chief justice Sandile Ngcobo.
This before a parliament in which, following the 2024 election, the ANC no longer commands an absolute majority.
It is difficult to imagine Ramaphosa subjecting himself to the humiliation of such an inquisition.
Earlier survival and ANC tactics
When the Ngcobo report was released in December 2002, he came within a hair’s breadth of resigning from office.
He was persuaded by his colleagues instead to fight a rearguard action: first through the courts and then through the simple but patently unconstitutional expedient of ANC MPs refusing even to interrogate the findings of a report that parliament itself had commissioned.
When the DA joined the government of national unity (GNU), part of the price of which was its shameful abandonment of support for an impeachment inquiry, it was left, ironically, to the ethically bedraggled EFF, backed by the African Transformation Movement, to persist.
Weaker ANC and shifting politics
Ironically, had Ramaphosa faced an impeachment inquiry then, when the ANC still commanded a majority, he would have survived it easily.
Now the country is economically much weaker and politically more vulnerable. His party is weaker. His position inside it is weaker.
And his major external prop, the DA, has just undergone a leadership change that is likely to make it less biddable.
Possible exit scenarios
Ramaphosa’s options are thus all dangerous. He may step down voluntarily before the inquiry reaches its most damaging phase.
He may be forced out by emboldened leadership challengers within the ANC.
He may try to negotiate a managed exit, staying long enough to preserve the GNU and avoid a disorderly succession.
Or, most nerve-wracking for him, his party, and the country, he may try to string out the impeachment process until the ANC’s 2027 elective conference, where his successor will be chosen.
Stalingrad strategy
This last option would be the most in character for Ramaphosa: procedural delay in the Stalingrad tradition so successfully demonstrated by his predecessor, Jacob Zuma. After Friday’s judgment, that will not be an easy strategy to implement.
It is only Gayton McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance (PA) that has nailed its colours firmly to Ramaphosa’s swaying mast. Even before the judgment was handed down, the PA was unequivocal: it would not support any motion to impeach.
But it is the DA that holds the strongest hand. Geordin Hill-Lewis has committed the DA to participating “fully and constructively” in the impeachment committee.
DA leverage and GNU negotiations
Where to from here? The GNU has so far delivered the ANC almost everything it wants and the DA remarkably little in return.
But the DA now has enormous leverage and it must use it, backed by corporate pressure, to force a new GNU-continuity settlement: Ramaphosa out, a tolerable ANC moderate in and significant policy concessions by the ANC.
This is the DA’s moment. And South Africa’s.
