South African President Ramaphosa will not step down as impeachment process unfolds

Johannesburg: South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced he will not step down from his position as an impeachment process unfolds in Parliament after an earlier ruling by the country’s highest judicial authority regarding an incident where a vast sum of undeclared US dollars were stolen from his farmstead in 2020.

As the country waited with bated breath for an official statement by Ramaphosa on national television on Monday evening, analysts and media spent the day speculating on whether the president would resign or continue amid divided opinions on the matter.

“There have been calls from certain quarters calling on me to resign. At the same time, there have also been calls for me not to resign. “I respectfully want to make it clear that I will not resign,” Ramaphosa said in his address.

“To do so would be to pre-empt a process defined by the Constitution. To do so would be to give credence to a panel report that unfortunately has grave flaws. To do so would be to abdicate the responsibility that I assumed when I became president of the Republic,” Ramaphosa added.

“To resign now would be to give in to those who seek to reverse the renewal of our society, the rebuilding of our institutions and the prosecution of corruption. I fully intend to continue serving the people of South Africa and to advance their interests. There is still much work to be done,” Ramaphosa said.

In what has become known as the Phala Phala incident, after the private farm where Ramaphosa breeds exotic cattle, the incident goes back to 2020, when USD 580 million were stolen from there, allegedly from where it was hidden inside a leather sofa.

The burglary only became known two years later, when the former head of State Security, Arthur Fraser, filed a criminal complaint against Ramaphosa for not declaring the money as required by law, or the theft to police.

At the time, Ramaphosa claimed that the money was proceeds from the sale of buffalo to a Sudanese businessman, Mustafa Mohamed Ibrahim Hazim, but the incident sparked a huge controversy regarding legal and ethical questions around it.

The scandal led to a Section 89 Independent Panel inquiry, which initially found that there was prima facie evidence that the president may have committed a serious violation of the law.

This brought the country to the brink of an impeachment process in late 2022, but the South African Reserve Bank and the Public Protector later cleared the president of certain legal breaches — concluding that the “sale” was never technically perfected and thus no legal obligation to declare the funds had yet arisen.

Ramaphosa was reportedly on the verge of resigning then, but was convinced by colleagues and legal advisers not to do so.

The parliamentary impeachment issue came to the fore again after a ruling by the Constitutional Court last Friday that effectively revived the Section 89 process that appeared to have been buried by a parliamentary vote nearly four years ago.

The apex court ruled that the National Assembly had acted unlawfully and unconstitutionally in December 2022 when it voted to reject the report by the Section 89 Independent Panel.

The court set aside the specific parliamentary rule that allowed the National Assembly to block the referral of the report to an impeachment committee. It also ordered that the Section 89 report be referred to a formal Impeachment Committee.

On Monday, National Assembly Speaker Thoko Didiza announced that Parliament will act in full compliance with the court order, initiating the process to constitute the Impeachment Committee, which will conduct public hearings into the president’s conduct regarding the Phala Phala incident.

In his televised address this evening, President Ramaphosa made it clear that while he respects the judiciary, he had no intention of resigning. He argued that the court’s ruling is procedural and does not constitute a finding of guilt.

Ramaphosa said he intends to relaunch a legal review of the original Section 89 panel’s findings.