The distinction is important because, as pointed out ad nauseam in the news, the argument in favour of an ANC vote is that you’re voting basically to strengthen the hand of the good folk instead of the bad in the country’s dominant political party. There’s been corruption going on since forever, they say, so let’s just all suck it up, stay calm and continue shopping.

Peter Bruce’s announcement was recently published as the cover story of the Financial Mail (“Who else but Cyril?”), and in Business Day (“Stand with Cyril and his principled allies”), as well as its online version (“I’ll vote ANC nationally and … provincially.”).

The declaration was not that unexpected and followed a general tenor of clear support for the Ramaphosa version of the ANC for quite some time now. And Bruce has, in his distinctly unruffled, calm and collected manner (much as he did during what must have been a scary stand-off with the BLF at his home in 2017), politely dispensed with opposing arguments from his detractors.

The Magashule question— that’s the small matter of the Ace Magashule camp said to be gunning for Ramaphosa and the spirited clean-up crew — is but water off a duck’s back to the esteemed columnist.

Many believe rumblings, and it’s becoming increasingly impossible to ignore, that the former grouping is poised unceremoniously to sweep aside the latter, once the elections are over and the president has made good on his Nasrec unity brief to deliver for the mother body a convincing victory. (This scenario is best and most succinctly depicted in the cartoon by the perennially brilliant Zapiro, of Ramaphosa’s buffalo stalked by a pack of salivating hyenas.)

The fear is given heft in the absence of any arrests (still) of high-profile party members involved in graft and criminal wrongdoing: their leader’s hands have been cable-tied by the determination of the Zupta/Bosasa fightback campaigners.

Consider the dictates of tribal and patronage politics, nepotism, cadre deployment and the “black tax” demands of the extended family principle and it makes for an explosive mix, contained only for the moment by the need to present a united façade as we count down to the elections.

A former editor of Business Day and Financial Mail, Bruce is quoted on the Herald Live site as saying:

“In Cyril Ramaphosa I believe firmly that we have a chance, however slight, of beginning to set SA right after the criminal administration of former president Jacob Zuma.”

But he has met with a fevered response from those who were apparently caught by surprise (some incensed, even) by the choice he finally came out and confirmed.

Fellow columnist William Saunderson-Meyer, writing on politicsweb, labelled as “absurd” the suggestion that South Africans who have previously voted for opposition parties “should ‘support’ President Cyril Ramaphosa’s faction against former president Jacob Zuma’s faction on May 8”.

“In dogged pursuit of this goal,” says Saunderson-Meyer, “(Bruce)… renewed his plea for the ‘suburbs’, despite the inevitable slow death of the ANC, to vote for Ramaphosa to give succour to the ‘brave people at the heart of government who have consistently showed courage and rectitude in the face of unimaginable pressure and disgraceful thuggery in the governing party’.”

The writer says the argument has an “illogical circularity” to it, countering that the ballot bears only one ANC emblem “and under it shelters not only Bruce’s ‘brave people’ but literally scores of candidates who have been implicated in criminality, as well as an array of factions, ranging from toxic revolutionaries to old-style liberals”.

Another of Bruce’s peers who responded was Michael Acott, a doyen among political correspondents since the 1980s, now with a global communications company.

“Here’s my election prediction,” wrote the astute Acott, delivering his in Business Day, that he himself has served as a former senior assistant editor: “Within six months of the poll, by November 2019 at the latest, Peter Bruce will write a column in which he will lament: ‘Sorry, I was wrong.’ ”

This really brings on the heat of the spotlight. Such has been the effect that’s been stirred up.

Yet, via his newspaper and other columns and on radio, Bruce has remained resolute and undeterred, while maintaining a gentlemanly cordiality towards his critics. All of which is par for the course — need it be said that in a democracy such as ours (such as it is), anyone and everyone is entitled to vote for whichever party they choose.

What is striking in all of this, however, is the disconnect on which Bruce’s arguments in support of a Ramaphosa vote is based, once placed in the context of statements and positions set out in his weekly columns of the recent past.

The question is how to reconcile a persistence in robustly advocating support for a political party/leader while voluntarily suspending disbelief in the process.

Specifically, just five months ago (Sunday Times, 11 November 2018), Bruce was trumpeting the persuasive expectations he had of the president with such confidence that one might well have mistaken him for the Ramaphosa imbongi he has been at pains to deny.

“… and Ramaphosa has his own orchestra to conduct,” Bruce commented. “He wants a crescendo around about March or April… By then he’ll have a national director of prosecutions in place. There’ll be arrests, I promise.”

Well, more than halfway through April and the only arrests of any consequence have been those of the Bosasa fall guys, bar the odd collateral collaring of an expendable junior party member here and there. No big fish, so to speak. A National Director of Public Prosecutions is in place, sure, but the double-speak issuing from the general vicinity of the president, his office and Luthuli House must have driven the incumbent, advocate Shamila Batohi, to the Eno Fruit Salts by now. So by Bruce’s own expectation, this exercise, to date, has fallen well short of his stated promise of Ramaphosa delivery.

In the same article, Bruce continues:

“In fact, Parliament has just ratified a brand-new extradition treaty with the United Arab Emirates, and I would be surprised if there were not efforts already under way to get the Gupta brothers back here and in prison in time for election day.”

There has as yet been no sign of any of the Gupta brothers on home soil (at least two have South African citizenship, after all), so another disappointment of expectation, then.

Bruce adds:

“A leader with even a little flair would organise their (Gupta brothers’) return two or three weeks before the vote. I would land them at Waterkloof and this time invite the world’s press to witness them being escorted to waiting police vans.”

With time running out, Ramaphosa’s “Thuma Mina”/“long game”/“new dawn”/(insert here) was meanwhile starting to unravel and revealed to be little more than a thinly veiled, self-serving vote-catching ruse, stretching credibility-by-association to breaking point.

Hence the sense of mild panic evident in the headline, “Batohi must have the guts to act decisively before May 8”, accompanying a subsequent column in Sunday Times (March 31).

Urging Batohi to “get moving”— with the rider that “if the president asks you to hold off, tell him to get out of your way” — the national prosecuting director is advised on how to proceed with regard to certain named state capture transgressors and others:

“You don’t have to complicate things,” Bruce urges. “Charge them with enough to send them to jail. It shouldn’t take much. And if Cyril Ramaphosa’s son took dirty money from Bosasa (we know he did), then charge him too.”

Clearly, there’s been nothing of the sort thus far.

The rushed tone of the call on Batohi had to it the ring of an effort to precipitate the vindication of an opinion that was fast expiring. And it wasn’t lost on the Executive Secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC), Lawson Naidoo.

In a personal letter of sharp rebuke in the same paper a week later, under the headline, “Bruce is playing with fire”, Naidoo pointed out:

“What Bruce is proposing is tantamount to abusing the prosecutorial process to serve a political purpose, and is surely what we are trying to get away from. This is exactly the approach that landed the NPA in the mess it is in now, and which Batohi is trying to clean up.”

It’s these curious blind spots that add up and strike a discordant note in the end, especially when considered against Bruce’s own measure.

What is of great concern, in the current arena of political contestation, are not in themselves the sweeping claims and statements made publicly by a widely read columnist of his stature, but rather that they are adhered to without public correction or reassessment, even in the face of demonstrably obvious examples to the contrary.

The bigger question concerns the impact this surely must have on Bruce’s not insignificant following of loyal readers in the “suburbs” to whom he directs his appeal for support; many, if not most, command not insignificant means, by which they are able to exercise a not insignificant reach of influence either. The president knows that; hence the Sandton wooing of 4 April.

So what might be the implications for voters thus rallied by Bruce, on the basis of what amounts to a well-meaning but ultimately deficient manifesto? With so much at stake, have they been served fairly in order to come to a fully informed, rational decision on such an important issue?

In concluding his column anticipating the president’s “crescendo”, Bruce forecasts:

“It just has to happen this way — a slow boil to a triumphant few closing weeks of an election campaign. Arrests, a few perp walks, charges being laid and prosecuted. A resurgent SARS. It can all be done.” To be fair, there is a resurgent SARS underway.

Here’s the thing, though: A victory for the peeling rust bucket that is the ANC juggernaut may well be unstoppable at the polls. But who’s to know what role Bruce’s signal in support of the Ramaphosa bromance would have played in the event he’s dead wrong — and there’s a landslide in what effectively would be a mandate for a faction that’s immoral and corrupt?

That’s a prospect that surely can’t sit well with anyone. DM