When former president Jacob Zuma was implicated in corruption, the media, business community, diplomats, and elite society rallied to have him removed from office. Meetings were held, money was raised, anguished pleas were made for the country to be delivered from such horror. Law enforcement was urged to take him on and lock him up. Why, then, is the response to revelations that President Cyril Ramaphosa may be a crook so different?

This time, much of the response seems to be to explain away the allegations around him, to argue that there is nothing substantive to go on. Meetings are held to think of ways to help him. Business says it is privately worried that he might go down for this. Some newspapers seem gleeful that he may even escape justice. The press is certainly muted relative to what it was on Zuma.

The difference is fear. Fear that after Cyril South Africa may collapse. But being weak now and trying to bail Mr Ramaphosa out is the wrong strategic response and will exacerbate that risk. The only workable mitigation strategy now is to be ruthless.

You cannot pick and choose on this stuff. The evidence against Mr Ramaphosa is overwhelming – hundreds of thousands of dollars hidden in furniture in one of his houses. Who does that? Drug dealers and terrorists and serious organised criminals. Decent law-abiding tax-paying people keep their money in a bank.

It is not as if Mr Ramaphosa was turning the ship around. The economy is in the doldrums. The much-vaunted Operation Vulindlela reforms are a lot of gumpf (the fixed investment rate is lower now than when they started). On property rights and empowerment policy, Mr Ramaphosa has presided over more investment-killing uncertainty than Mr Zuma did. Foreign policy is shameful. There are crooks all over his government. And not one serious person has been prosecuted and jailed for corruption during his time in office!

What happens in the aftermath of a CR exit?

Paul Mashatile becomes president. He brings uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) into the Government of National Unity (GNU) but leaves the Democratic Alliance (DA) in place at first before starting to squeeze it out or force it to walk. It shouldn’t be afraid to do the latter.

The ANC will lose the most if the DA walks. The ANC’s vote share depends more than anything else on the material circumstances of its voters. The “new GNU” will depress sentiment on South Africa and crush the already low growth rate as investors reprice the country given the risk inherent in a leftward policy shift. Recession will beckon, the currency will detach from tracking the movement of the dollar, yields will spike and so too job losses. Inflation will lift. The effect should be that ANC gets absolutely hammered at the 2029 election.

Politics is about power – and has nothing to do with being nice or accommodating and making friends or finding the middle ground or seeking compromise. Mr Ramaphosa is the case study of the hour: by not putting his adversaries in prison first and by not driving sensible reforms to lift the economy and improve living standards – and hence shore up public confidence in himself and his administration – he laid himself open to what has now befallen him.

Messrs Zuma and Malema have been strong, ruthless, and determined, which is why they’ve turned the tables on Mr Ramaphosa. Just think of it – to get the Constitutional Court, and a judge appointed by Mr Ramaphosa himself, to put Mr Ramaphosa on public trial for corruption!

There’s a lesson in that for the DA – that it should now be ruthless too. Negotiations work best when backed up a willingness to bring hard power forward fast when they’re not going your way. The ANC must be made to understand that it should be grateful that the DA is prepared to meet with it to negotiate a way to govern the country – and that it should do all in its power to take the DA up sincerely on that offer. But that if the ANC screws around, and plays all manner of silly games, then the DA is prepared to see it publicly hang.

Won’t that wreck the country?

If the coming ANC/EFF/MK collective is anything as terrible as some analysts fear, then there is no other message but ruthless strength to send them. Indulgence and diplomacy in the hope that this will moderate the ANC did not work even with Mr Ramaphosa – now it must work with MK? There is no way.

The DA should therefore not bail Ramaphosa out and instead let the chips fall where they may, and if there are grounds for impeachment, then impeach the man.

If Mr Mashatile, or whoever comes to lead the ANC next, wishes to talk then make it clear that the DA’s conditions are reforming BEE, as that party recently proposed, redrafting expropriation legislation, and full private management of ports and rail.

To an overwhelming extent, ANC voters (past and present) are moderate and centrist. The bulk of ANC voters even support the DA’s new BEE policy. Most ANC voters oppose expropriation without compensation (EWC). Most wish to fix ties with the USA. The ideas the DA should stand on as conditions of a deal are all popular in the ANC camp.

If that is so, why haven’t ANC voters yet broken in greater numbers for the DA? Part of the reason is that “the idea” of Mr Ramaphosa sustained the hope that perhaps there was a better future through the ANC. That’s now dead. The second was confidence that you could still vote ANC but get the DA in the government.

The DA would do well now to disabuse the public of both notions – and make plain that voters have a choice to make between two very different parties that lead to two very different futures, clear blue water as it were.

Nor should the DA write-down what the electoral dividend of demonstrating national strength may be. South Africa is not a namby-pamby country of pink-haired social justice greenie liberals sniffling into their almond chai at the thought of Ramaphosa’s demise. It’s a hard country of rock-drilling miners, taxi drivers, grandmothers raising crowds of children with almost no money, cattle rustlers and rhino poachers, recyclers sitting out the cold winter nights around makeshift fires in the country’s parks as they wait for the middle classes to wheel out their garbage bins, and tough entrepreneurs who make profits and pay salaries even as they have to supply their own water and electricity.

There are concerns in the DA that if it were this ruthless, the public might accuse it of brinkmanship and blame it for the risk that an ANC/EFF/MK administration comes to power. One answer is that that is now the unavoidable reality – one occasioned by Mr Ramaphosa’s sheer foolishness. A second is that weakness is what brought this about in the first place. A third is that the risk of DA voters blaming it and then harming its future electoral showing is likely exaggerated. What are current and potential DA voters going to do in the face of an imminent ANC/EFF/MK government that threatens to nationalise pensions as inflation shoots through the roof? It’s obvious what they’ll do.

And the more that voters do that the stronger the DA’s hand will become in the talks that lie ahead with whoever it is who will come to lead the ANC. A strength that will be greater yet for the realisation that the DA guys are not screwing around anymore. If that leader is Paul Mashatile, this strategy is the only way. If it is Patrice Motsepe, and he is as sensible and strong as this newspaper thinks, so much the better. And who knows? Maybe even old Cyril realising that the DA now holds the cards, and fearing prison, will agree to the reform terms the DA should set – the singular case in which the right thing to do would be to bail him out for the sake of saving the country.