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"Cyril the Silent." Moeletsi Mabe/Sunday Times/Gallo Images/Getty Images
On Christmas Day 2019, a mysterious North African buyer, flush with hundreds of thousands of dollar bills, allegedly arrived unannounced at a game farm owned by South Africa’s President Ramaphosa (then absent) and bought 20 buffalo from a lodge caretaker. The beasts were never claimed and no arrangements were ever made to export them.
The dollar bills — at least $580,000 worth — were shoved into a sofa for safekeeping at the lodge by staff, according to a subsequent report, and were still there two months later. That’s when an enterprising housekeeper in cahoots with a Namibian money-laundering gangster allegedly stole a chunk of the loot on 9 February 2020. President Ramaphosa, by his own evidence, had known about the transaction two months before the cash was stolen.
No public statement was ever made about the theft. No arrests have been made nor convictions secured. Had it not been for a whistleblower — one of Ramaphosa’s arch political foes — nothing would have been known publicly about the incident. It’s no wonder that the President is known by his fellow-countrymen as Cyril the Silent.
Ever since the “Farmgate” scandal was exposed, Ramaphosa has struggled to silence his critics. The row has revealed yet again the turpitude of the ruling African National Congress, and the tragic absence of any viable alternative political leadership from within the ranks of Africa’s oldest political party. It is not the incident of possible criminality that is alarming: South Africans are immured to skulduggery in both the public and private sectors, from the highest to the lowest levels. It is rather the emergence of a terrifying national question: what if President Cyril Ramaphosa goes?
Hailed as the saviour of South Africa upon election four years ago, Ramaphosa this week temporarily dodged a preliminary Parliamentary impeachment inquiry into the bizarre set of circumstances that played out on his game farm. To do so, he used a well-known legal wheeze known as “the Stalingrad Tactic”: seeking a Constitutional Court Review of the report of an independent panel of judges into the events.
It appears Ramaphosa is learning from the master: the comprehensively corrupt Jacob Zuma. The former president deployed similar diversionary and often vexatious legal tactics to keep out of both court and jail for years, in some cases decades, in a string of corruption and racketeering charges. But Ramaphosa’s party leadership does not appear fazed by the likeness — and many in the public still support him.
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SubscribeMugabe survived for nearly 40 years in Zimbabwe. So Ramphosa’s four years in South Africa locate him in the kindergarten of the African school.
The Woking Class fashion these days is to call for reparations from Britain and other colonial powers, and of course the USA, to be paid to the blacks in Africa and elsewhere for the suffering they and their ancestors are asserted to have experienced as a consequence of so-called white supremacy. Ironically, the suffering of Africans under black supremacy before and since the colonial era is on a different scale and nature altogether – genocide, economic collapse, infrastructure destruction, disease, corruption, lawlessness, torture, dictatorship, uncontrolled population growth, agricultural failure, terror regimes …
Perhaps we should start thinking instead about demanding reparations of Africa’s leaders, like Ramaphosa. Apart from killing countless millions of their own citizens through murder, starvation and incompetence, they have embezzled and stolen vast quantities of wealth (natural, created, donated) from their continent and destroyed the economic legacies they inherited when they ‘liberated’ their nations from the colonial noose. Since the late 1950s their former ‘masters’ have invested some 5 trillion US dollars of foreign aid in these ‘free’ countries over the last sixty years. Much of this largesse ended up in Swiss and offshore bank accounts; or is invested in billionaire properties around the globe. Surely, more than enough reparations have already been paid?
We can see now, after nearly three-quarters of a century of ‘freedom’, that the so-called ‘liberation struggles’ to throw off the shackles of colonialism in Africa were actually wars of acquisition – for the war leaders (the ‘heroes’) to obtain political power through the barrels of guns in order to plunder enormous inherited wealth without the need to create it themselves or share it with their subject peoples.
Agreed, Ebagum was dreadful, but what happened to his equally appalling wife?
Ebagum’s ghastly wife is still around – and has vast wealth resources and investments around the world. Disgusting!
Thank you.
In my mind I had stupidly confused her with that child killer Mrs Winnie Mandela, she of the ‘necklace’ fame.
Silly me!
Thank you.
In my mind I had stupidly confused her with that child killer Mrs Winnie Mandela, she of the ‘necklace’ fame.
Silly me!
Ebagum’s ghastly wife is still around – and has vast wealth resources and investments around the world. Disgusting!
“The Woking Class “.
I love it!!
Excellent precis thanks
Agreed, Ebagum was dreadful, but what happened to his equally appalling wife?
“The Woking Class “.
I love it!!
Excellent precis thanks
Mugabe survived for nearly 40 years in Zimbabwe. So Ramphosa’s four years in South Africa locate him in the kindergarten of the African school.
The Woking Class fashion these days is to call for reparations from Britain and other colonial powers, and of course the USA, to be paid to the blacks in Africa and elsewhere for the suffering they and their ancestors are asserted to have experienced as a consequence of so-called white supremacy. Ironically, the suffering of Africans under black supremacy before and since the colonial era is on a different scale and nature altogether – genocide, economic collapse, infrastructure destruction, disease, corruption, lawlessness, torture, dictatorship, uncontrolled population growth, agricultural failure, terror regimes …
Perhaps we should start thinking instead about demanding reparations of Africa’s leaders, like Ramaphosa. Apart from killing countless millions of their own citizens through murder, starvation and incompetence, they have embezzled and stolen vast quantities of wealth (natural, created, donated) from their continent and destroyed the economic legacies they inherited when they ‘liberated’ their nations from the colonial noose. Since the late 1950s their former ‘masters’ have invested some 5 trillion US dollars of foreign aid in these ‘free’ countries over the last sixty years. Much of this largesse ended up in Swiss and offshore bank accounts; or is invested in billionaire properties around the globe. Surely, more than enough reparations have already been paid?
We can see now, after nearly three-quarters of a century of ‘freedom’, that the so-called ‘liberation struggles’ to throw off the shackles of colonialism in Africa were actually wars of acquisition – for the war leaders (the ‘heroes’) to obtain political power through the barrels of guns in order to plunder enormous inherited wealth without the need to create it themselves or share it with their subject peoples.
SA is in Africa. This is just business as usual there.
South Africa is truelly disfunctional and Ramaposa is a curupt liar and his party, ANC, he and all the hangers on have robbed this country of any meaningful future it could have had. He is weak, vacilates and is blind to the realities surrounded by his sycophants corruption enablers and the greedy hangers on.
Isn’t this a contemporary aspect of the greed and cupidity that made Africans sell their own to traders from both the Arab world and much later the European world. Greed and Cupidity. Now we see it in our neighbourhoods when black young men “sell” drugs to stupid addle headed white boys who have lost all self control and ability to think through taking drugs thinking it was an adventure or a cool thing to do,or an escape from mental trauma.
Isn’t this a contemporary aspect of the greed and cupidity that made Africans sell their own to traders from both the Arab world and much later the European world. Greed and Cupidity. Now we see it in our neighbourhoods when black young men “sell” drugs to stupid addle headed white boys who have lost all self control and ability to think through taking drugs thinking it was an adventure or a cool thing to do,or an escape from mental trauma.
South Africa is truelly disfunctional and Ramaposa is a curupt liar and his party, ANC, he and all the hangers on have robbed this country of any meaningful future it could have had. He is weak, vacilates and is blind to the realities surrounded by his sycophants corruption enablers and the greedy hangers on.
SA is in Africa. This is just business as usual there.
How on earth this ‘atrocity’ has been allowed to survive for so long is completely beyond me.
How on earth this ‘atrocity’ has been allowed to survive for so long is completely beyond me.
Stunning article. Good to make fun of the clowns. All focussed on their own interests and not the country. So much for Ubuntu.
Who cares; the apartheid regime is gone, that’s all that really matters, right!? </sarc>
To be serious; let the South Africans sort it out – or not, I don’t care. It’s their problem.
Who cares; the apartheid regime is gone, that’s all that really matters, right!? </sarc>
To be serious; let the South Africans sort it out – or not, I don’t care. It’s their problem.
Stunning article. Good to make fun of the clowns. All focussed on their own interests and not the country. So much for Ubuntu.