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President Cyril Ramaphosa.
- President Cyril Ramaphosa says that history will absolve him of his efforts to fight corruption.
- He told Sanef that all the government can do is strengthen law enforcement agencies, so they can do their job.
- Ramaphosa also said that those who benefited from a collapsed state would continue to try.
President Cyril Ramaphosa said that history will absolve him when it comes to fighting corruption, insisting that the country is on the right track.
Ramaphosa said the only thing the government can do is strengthen crime-fighting institutions and give them space to do their jobs.
“History will absolve me because the determination to fix things is there,” the president said Wednesday night, when asked about his government’s response to widespread corruption.
He was in dialogue with the South African National Publishers Forum (Sanef).
He discussed a number of topics, including corruption, Covid-19, and the country’s plans for economic recovery.
Ramaphosa admitted that the lack of law enforcement capacity was a major concern.
He added that he had been informed of the lack of capacity, and that some of the law enforcement agencies had been emptied.
“The capture of the state has drained their capacity, the people who were good at their jobs were expelled; they were fired, persecuted until they left and some of them have been compromised,” he told the group of high-level editors and journalists.
He said all the government could do was train law enforcement agencies and ask them to communicate the areas where they are experiencing challenges.
The president agreed with the claim that corruption related to personal protective equipment (PPE) amounts to murder.
Ramaphosa said:
The WHO says it is murder and I also take that point of view because those who raised prices, in some cases up to 800%. I wonder what goes through someone’s head that a mask would normally cost R2 or R3 rand sells for R90 … that should tell someone that it is not only wrong, it is criminal, completely unacceptable.
The president said this also applied to those who produced poor quality equipment and products.
Dysfunction
Ramaphosa said he understood the frustration, which he said was justified in the face of growing corruption, but insisted that there are efforts in the right direction.
“We may be moving at a slow pace. We may be moving at a pace, you know, where people want a faster movement, but we are fixing things neatly,” he said.
He said the country has reached a stage where the changes that many want to see will begin to occur.
“Those forces will continue to exist that resist change and will seek to stop,” Ramaphosa said.
He said that those who benefited from a dysfunctional state would seek to continue to do so.
But he also insisted that he himself could never lead arrests of people.
“The day you have a president who goes out and arrests people, prosecutes them and jails them, he has to run for the hills,” Ramaphosa said.
The president also explained why politicians, implicated in corruption, remained in office. He said that labor laws had to be respected.
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