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The African National Congress (ANC) is out of options on Ramaphosa. If it keeps him, it owns the allegations now surrounding the president, and as this newspaper has reported, the president should be facing more than ten charges of malfeasance and abuse of office. The trouble for the ANC is that Ramaphosa’s value to the party rested in the idea of Ramaphosa as a reformer who would clean up the rot, not whether the man was in office or not.

That idea, of Ramaphosa the reformer, is now wrecked.

That problem is going to grow for the ANC if it seeks to defend him to the hilt. To the public, it is not simply defending a president. It is defending the betrayal of the idea that kept many voters, investors, and moderates willing to give the party one last chance.

Elite South African society does not see this yet in its clamour to have Ramaphosa protected, and it is an open secret that senior business figures are creating pressure for him to be shielded from justice (how the script has flipped from 2017…). However, polling published by The Common Sense has already shown that 51% of South Africans would support a motion of no confidence in Ramaphosa. The longer the ANC defends him, the more it risks looking like a party protecting its leader on behalf of a small elite rather than an organisation protecting the country.

But if the ANC axes him, it may face an even darker prospect.

The obvious successor is Paul Mashatile, and Mashatile is no rescue plan. He would simply compound the economic and living standards crisis he inherits and exacerbate the brand crisis as he seeks to bring the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) into the government – the very thing South Africa’s elites are working to avoid.

That is why the ANC is trapped.

A pragmatic party would understand that survival now requires a real deal, not another managed compromise. If it were serious, the ANC would go to the Democratic Alliance (DA) and Geordin Hill-Lewis and ask for help in exchange for supporting key reforms.

The DA should not entertain that bargain unless a strict timeframe is agreed for the government to move firmly towards adopting the DA’s new empowerment policy proposal, redrafting expropriation legislation to protect property rights, agreeing to a serious trade and investment pact with the United States, and placing ports and rail under full private administration. Some other things could be added to the bargain, such as the DA appointing its own directors general in the government ministries it controls.

The effect would be to tell markets, voters, and South Africa’s allies that the government has chosen growth over ideology and recovery over factional survival, and the rate of growth will quickly lift from the current 1% to nearer 3%. South Africa will be saved and the populist wind pulled from MK and the EFF’s sails.

Ramaphosa won’t do this, though, too stubborn to see that, for the ANC’s sake, he must do this while his party still has a majority over the DA (current polling places it just below 40% and the DA just below 30%). But Ramaphosa is too scarred for that, a man haunted by the idea that he always sold out to whites, as a trade union leader swanning about with Anglo American while Jacob Zuma et al were fighting the Boere, as a negotiator frittering away the great black nationalist revolution, as a business leader swanning about (again) with the wealthy while the black masses remained in poverty, and as ANC leader, elevated to that post by white executives as much as anything else, having later to beg Helen Zille for the Government of National Unity deal after he crashed the ANC plane (this newspaper maintains that with the most basic strategic acumen the ANC could have got 55% in 2024). To now go and plead for help again, as the final act of his career, and now from the young Cape Town Mayor, is likely a thing he cannot bring himself to do.

If he won’t seek their help, Hill-Lewis and colleagues should decide to take a hard line on the ANC now, sink Ramaphosa, which it is in their power to do, and then go on the offensive against Mashatile in pursuit of the real prospect of flipping the script. Come 2029, it is the DA that may be near 40% and the ANC near 30% – in a strong position to lead the government.

What could go wrong? Mashatile, the EFF, and MK could come to power, so exactly the same thing that is now already so well in train.

That there is risk in the strategy can therefore no longer be helped. It is the unavoidable reality of where the country is at. And that risk does not arise from whether Ramaphosa survives or not. It lies in what this newspaper reported on the unemployment rate, a problem he did nothing to address and therefore served merely to compound, and thereby all the risk that arises from it. Going softly now is only to buy time until the great reckoning buried in that unemployment data is unleashed upon the country.

Heading that off requires boldness and, if Ramaphosa cannot see that it is over and that the DA holds the cards, then it is best to remove him from office forthwith, force the ANC into its Mashatile reckoning, and present the public with an explicit choice in 2029.