Patience is a rare virtue, and when you’ve watched your country being sold down the river for the best part of two decades, it’s in short supply.

With David Mabuza now confirmed as deputy president, criticism of the rather stop-start rollout of Cyril Ramaphosa’s New Dawn has continued.

(You can read more on the case against Mabuza here.)

Yes, he’s fighting a serious battle for power inside the ANC itself, but appointing yet another MP with a long shadow of corruption hanging over their heads isn’t a great look.

Having attacked the ANC ahead of the May election, saying that ‘a vote for Cyril is a vote for thieves’, political commentator Justice Malala seems to have changed his tune.

In an opinion piece published on TimesLIVE earlier today, Malala called for patience, saying that Ramaphosa has played the long game to get where he is:

In 2012, when he realised he had no chance of winning the ANC presidency from Jacob Zuma, he joined up with the kleptocrat so that, little by little, he can get to the centre of government and the ANC. At the December 2017 ANC conference in Nasrec he made his move, but came away with a very narrow win.

His “slate” suffered major setbacks, particularly in the battle for the top six positions of the party. Ace Magashule, a fervent Zuma lieutenant, won the secretary-general position…

He said the meagre win they had “gives us a beachhead, a beachhead to be able to start the process of reinstilling the values of our movement in the ANC”.

That is the key to Cyril Ramaphosa and his tenure. The country, the financial markets and everyone else should realise that this is how things will be for the next five years at least. Why? That is how long it will take to get rid of the Zuma detritus, little by little. That is how long it may take to turn the trade unions around to allowing some loosening of the labour market.

Sorry for 25 years of gross incompetence and criminality, but if you could just be a little more patient, we’ll sort out this mess.

At least the recent Cabinet announcement booted the likes of Bathabile Dlamini and Nomvula Mokonyane to the curb, with women making up 50% of the appointments, but there was still plenty of deadwood, and worse, amongst those selected.

Again, patience:

Ramaphosa has spoken of capability to do the job. Ten out of 10 to him for picking Tito Mboweni and Pravin Gordhan to the key finance and state-owned enterprise ministries. Yet to put Thulas Nxesi, a key figure in the Nkandla scandal and a former leader of the quite frankly useless SA Democratic Teachers’ Union, in charge of employment is to insult the word itself.

Then he appointed Ebrahim Patel to the trade and industry department. Patel is the complete antithesis of Mboweni and Gordhan. He thinks the state creates jobs. How he will work with Mboweni boggles the mind.

Other aspects of the cabinet are the same: small moves forward (getting rid of some state capture superstars while keeping the likes of David Mahlobo [above], for example) and some backwards.

Expect no revolution here, folks. It is all “kancane kancane”.

“Kancane kancane” is along the lines of “bietjie bietjie maak meer”, meaning “little by little”, which Malala says “encapsulate the Ramaphosa Way”.

There’s just one problem with that – the problems we have are not little, and patience is wearing very, very thin.

We should learn the outcomes of the ANC lekgotla, or national executive committee (NEC) meeting, that started this weekend either today or tomorrow (more likely the latter), which will give us an indication of how powerful Ramaphosa’s hand really is.

If he comes out with the majority of the party backing him, we deserve to have that patience rewarded.

[source:timeslive]