South African President Cyril Ramaphosa declared on Monday that he will not resign and will legally challenge the independent panel report that underpins parliamentary impeachment proceedings against him. The Constitutional Court ruled last week that parliament acted unconstitutionally in 2022 when it voted against establishing an impeachment inquiry into the Phala Phala scandal — in which $4 million in foreign cash was discovered hidden in furniture at Ramaphosa’s private game farm after it was stolen, and then allegedly concealed from law enforcement. A parliamentary impeachment committee is now to be established. Ramaphosa, who has served as president since 2018 and denies wrongdoing, said the money came from the legitimate sale of buffalo. The ANC called an emergency National Executive Committee meeting for Tuesday. However, political analysts have noted that even if the impeachment committee proceeds and returns an adverse finding, a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly is required for removal — and the ANC still holds more than one-third of seats, making formal removal arithmetically unlikely.
The received wisdom
The mainstream democratic-institutional reading is that Ramaphosa, whatever his personal failings, is the best available option in a field of worse alternatives. His presidency has been defined by attempting to stabilise an ANC that was largely looted during the Zuma years, and by navigating a post-2024 election landscape in which the ANC lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 1994. The coalition government he assembled — incorporating the Democratic Alliance and other parties — is precisely the kind of multi-party accountability structure that democratic theory prescribes. The Constitutional Court ruling, forcing the impeachment issue back to parliament, is the rule of law operating correctly: the 2022 parliamentary vote to bury the inquiry was a manipulation of the process, and the court has rightly undone it.
On this reading, Ramaphosa’s legal challenge to the independent panel report is a legitimate exercise of his rights. He deserves his day in whatever forum, and the impeachment committee process — which will take months — is a better outcome than a rushed resignation that installs a less competent successor from the ANC’s restive factions.
A different read
All of that may be technically accurate, and none of it addresses the structural problem underneath.
The Phala Phala scandal is not, at its core, a story about one politician’s misconduct. It is a story about the impossibility of separating the ANC as a governing institution from the private interests of the people who run it. Ramaphosa is a billionaire. He acquired most of his wealth during the ANC’s decades in power, partly through Black Economic Empowerment arrangements that created a class of politically connected businesspeople whose fortunes are inseparable from political access. The game farm where $4 million in foreign cash was found is not incidental to his political profile — it is, in miniature, a portrait of how post-apartheid South African capitalism actually works.
The ANC has governed South Africa since 1994. In that time, it has presided over both genuine achievements — the consolidation of a constitutional democracy from a society emerging from apartheid, sustained economic growth through the early 2000s, the expansion of social grants to tens of millions of people — and a systematic hollowing out of state institutions through what South Africans have come to call “state capture.” Eskom, the power utility, became a vehicle for politically connected procurement to such a degree that it now produces load-shedding on a daily basis. The South African Revenue Service was deliberately weakened under Zuma to protect well-connected taxpayers. The National Prosecuting Authority was similarly compromised. Ramaphosa came to power promising to reverse this. He has partially done so — and the Zondo Commission, which documented state capture in extraordinary detail, is a genuine achievement of institutional honesty. But the man overseeing that inquiry had $4 million in unexplained cash hidden in his sofa.
The political arithmetic — that the ANC’s rump share of parliament, just over one-third, makes formal removal impossible — is itself the most damning detail. The Constitutional Court can compel a process, but it cannot compel an outcome when the process is controlled by a party whose institutional survival is bound up with the president’s. The EFF and ATM, which brought the impeachment case, are right on the legal merits and largely wrong on the politics. Their loudest voices, including Julius Malema of the EFF, have their own histories of financial controversy.
What South Africa has produced — and this is the difficult thing for the democratic consensus to admit — is not failed democracy but successful constitutional formalism in the service of a political class that has learned to use democratic procedure to protect itself from democratic accountability. The impeachment committee will meet. It will deliberate. It will, in all probability, not recommend removal. And Ramaphosa will serve out his term, legally vindicated, politically diminished, and governing a country whose electricity grid cannot reliably function.
What to watch
Watch the ANC NEC emergency meeting: if significant internal voices call for Ramaphosa to step down “voluntarily” as a way of managing the constitutional process, that would signal a different calculation than his public defiance suggests. Watch the legal challenge to the independent panel report — the argument that it relied on hearsay evidence has some technical merit and, if accepted by the courts, could further delay proceedings beyond Ramaphosa’s current term. Watch the coalition government dynamics: the Democratic Alliance and other coalition partners have limited leverage over the ANC on an impeachment question, but their continued participation in government provides Ramaphosa with political legitimacy that a purely ANC minority government would lack. And watch the 2027 general election calendar, which increasingly shapes every calculation in Pretoria: the real verdict on Ramaphosa’s legacy may come not from an impeachment committee but from an electorate that has watched the Phala Phala proceedings for two years and decided what it thinks.
— J