ON Friday, 24 July 2026, a full bench of the Western Cape High Court – Judges André le Grange, Matthew Francis and Diane Davis – will hand down judgment on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s urgent bid to halt Parliament’s Section 89 Impeachment Committee. Whichever way that ruling falls, it should not be mistaken for the real verdict this country needs. Whether the interdict is granted or refused, whether the process is paused for a season or allowed to run, the underlying fact will not move an inch: South Africa’s president is facing the gravest institutional threat of his political career, and the uncomfortable truth is that he built it himself, brick by brick, with his own hands. Parliament’s Section 89 process against Cyril Ramaphosa did not arrive out of nowhere. It did not arrive because enemies conspired against an innocent man. It arrived because the President, on more than one occasion, chose personal instinct over presidential discipline – and because his own party, when it had the chance to let the process breathe in 2022, chose to smother it instead.
A decade ago, when Ramaphosa ascended first to the deputy presidency and later to the presidency, he made a promise that was received with genuine relief by a country weary of leaders entangled in murky business interests. A successful, multimillion-rand businessman by any measure, he announced that he was stepping back from the empire he had built. His business interests, he said, would be placed in a trust and run by others – family members, professional managers, trustees – while he devoted himself, undistracted and unconflicted, to the business of the nation. It was applauded, and rightly so, as the ethical standard the country needed. The problem is that it did not hold.
The interdict now before the Western Cape High Court is narrow and technical: whether the Section 89 committee may continue its preparatory work – appointing an evidence leader, lining up witnesses – while Ramaphosa’s separate review of the Ngcobo panel’s report is heard in September. His legal team, led by Advocate Wim Trengove SC, has argued that proceeding now would expose the President to a ‘humiliating public trial’ and cause him irreparable reputational harm. Counsel for the opposition parties opposing the interdict countered, bluntly, that the President is asking the court to stray into Parliament’s own domain, and that the damage – if any – was already done the moment the allegations became public years ago.
Both sides will get their answer at 10 am on Friday. But an interdict, if granted, only pauses a clock; it does not rewrite what put that clock in motion. And a refusal, while it lets the committee proceed, still leaves unresolved the deeper institutional question this newspaper is concerned with: not whether the process is lawful, but why it was ever necessary. No High Court ruling, on either side, changes the fact that a president who promised to remove himself from business inserted himself into a scandal that a competent farm manager should have carried alone.
The first crack in that promise came, remarkably, from the President’s own mouth. At an ANC event in Limpopo, Ramaphosa told delegates – in full view of television cameras and in the glare of public record – that he was an active farmer who sold livestock, and he even joked that some of the very delegates in front of him were his customers. There was no ambiguity in it, no room for spin. This was the head of state describing, casually and proudly, an ongoing commercial relationship with the public he serves.
That single, throwaway boast is more consequential than it sounded in the moment. The Executive Ethics Code, the instrument that governs the conduct of the President and every member of the national executive, is direct on this point. It prohibits members of the executive from receiving remuneration for work outside their official functions, and requires that the President’s declared income come from the state and the state alone.
That is not a technicality. It is the foundational bargain a head of state makes with the citizens who elected him: that his judgement, his time and his loyalty belong to the country, undivided by the pull of private profit. When a sitting president tells a crowd that he is still selling cattle to the very people he governs, he is not confessing to a minor slip. He is confessing, in public, to conducting the kind of remunerative outside work the Code exists to prevent. That, on its own — quite apart from Phala Phala — is a matter serious enough to warrant Parliament’s attention on behalf of the millions of South Africans this Code is meant to protect.
PHALA PHALA: THE MANAGER SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE STORY
The second, far larger crack is the Phala Phala affair – the theft of roughly half a million US dollars in cash from the President’s game farm in February 2020, an episode that has since metastasised into the constitutional crisis now playing out in Parliament and the courts. Strip away the noise around it and the core failure is simple to state: this should never have become a presidential story at all.
Phala Phala, like any properly run commercial farm, has managers who run its day-to-day affairs on the owner’s behalf. When cash was stolen from the property, the correct and constitutionally coherent response was obvious. The President, as owner, was entitled to be informed. What he was not entitled to do – not if his 2018 pledge to the country meant anything – was to insert himself into the operational response: mobilising his head of the Presidential Protection Unit, directing the pursuit of suspects, and becoming personally entangled in a matter that his own trust arrangement was designed to keep at arm’s length from the Union Buildings.
The farm manager, not the President, should have been the face of this saga from day one. It should have been the manager fielding the Reserve Bank’s questions about undeclared foreign currency, the manager explaining the transaction to SARS, the manager standing before investigators to account for cash kept in furniture rather than a bank. Had that division of labour — the one Ramaphosa himself promised the nation — actually been honoured in practice, there would be no Section 89 panel, no finding of a prima facie case to answer, no interdict application in the Western Cape High Court, and no impeachment committee summoning constitutional lawyers to debate the President’s fitness for office. The President inserted himself into precisely the kind of situation his own ethical pledge was designed to keep him out of.
WHY A HEAD OF STATE HAS NO BUSINESS IN BUSINESS
This is not pedantry. There are hard, structural reasons why constitutional democracies insist that a president have no active hand in commerce:
— Conflict of interest is unavoidable, not hypothetical. A president who trades cattle, currency or contracts is a president whose regulatory, tax and law-enforcement decisions can never be fully separated from his own pocket.
— Capture becomes structurally easier. Anyone doing business with the President — buying his livestock, moving his money — gains a private channel of access and goodwill that ordinary citizens and companies do not have.
— It corrodes institutional trust. Ordinary South Africans are asked to believe that SARS, the Reserve Bank and the Hawks will treat the President’s private financial affairs exactly as they would anyone else’s — a belief that becomes much harder to sustain once the President is the one negotiating the sale of an asset or defending an undeclared sum.
— It exposes the presidency, not just the person. Every hour spent explaining a private cash discrepancy is an hour parliament, the media and the public are not spending on the state of the nation — an institutional cost paid by the country, not by Ramaphosa alone.
— It sets the precedent for those who follow. If a president can plead that his farm manager’s affairs are somehow inseparable from his own, the standard for every executive member after him is quietly lowered.
WHO WAS ADVISING HIM?
Beyond the President’s own conduct sits an uncomfortable question about the quality of counsel around him. Ramaphosa did not arrive at the Union Buildings without a brain trust — seasoned advisors, legal minds, communications strategists steeped in exactly this kind of reputational terrain. It strains belief that none of them, in the days after the Phala Phala theft became known, cautioned him against personally directing the response. Either that advice was given and ignored, which speaks to a worrying streak of self-assurance in a president who has otherwise governed cautiously, or it was never given at all, which speaks to a brain trust that failed him at the exact moment its judgement mattered most. Neither explanation reflects well on the machinery around the presidency.
THE ANC’S ORIGINAL SIN
Ramaphosa’s own conduct is only half of this story. The other half belongs to his party. When the independent panel chaired by retired Chief Justice Sandile Ngcobo reported in November 2022 that there was prima facie evidence Ramaphosa may have breached both the Constitution and the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act in his handling of the Phala Phala theft, Parliament had a straightforward constitutional duty in front of it: refer that report to a full Section 89 inquiry and let the facts be tested, in public, by a properly constituted committee. That is precisely what did not happen.
On 13 December 2022, the ANC used its then parliamentary majority to vote down the very motion that would have opened that inquiry, killing the process at the National Assembly floor before a single witness could be called. It was a decision made not on the merits of the evidence but on the arithmetic of loyalty – a party protecting its own president rather than allowing the institution built to hold him accountable to do its work. The Constitutional Court would later find, in the ruling that revived this process in May 2026, that this vote was itself inconsistent with the Constitution. Chief Justice Mandisa Maya’s court did not mince its words: Parliament’s 2022 decision to block the inquiry could not stand.
That miscalculation compounded, rather than contained, the President’s original error. Had the ANC allowed the Ngcobo panel’s findings to be tested properly in 2022 – through open hearings, cross-examination, and a full committee process – this matter would likely have been resolved, one way or another, years ago, on a timeline the President himself could have managed. Instead, the party’s majority was deployed not to protect the institution of the presidency but to protect the individual who then held it, deferring a reckoning rather than delivering one. The result is the protracted, reputationally corrosive spectacle now playing out in the courts and in Parliament: a crisis that is, in no small part, an ANC-manufactured delay dressed up as a resolution.
A PRESIDENCY OF REAL ACHIEVEMENT, UNDONE BY ONE UNFORCED ERROR
None of this should be read as a wholesale indictment of Ramaphosa’s presidency. He has, across genuinely turbulent years, made decisions that served South Africa’s interests and steered the country through crises – economic, political and social – that could easily have broken a lesser leader. His record deserves to be weighed honestly, in full, and not flattened into a single scandal.
But Phala Phala is not a case of a president undone by forces beyond his control. It is a case of a president who wrote his own ethical rulebook – no outside business, everything in trust, run by others – and then, when the moment came to live by it, could not resist stepping back onto the field himself. Had he simply sat this one out, had he let the farm manager carry the burden he was hired to carry, Ramaphosa would not now be standing before a Section 89 committee, fighting in the Western Cape High Court to halt the very process the Constitutional Court revived, and gambling his legacy on a two-thirds majority he does not expect Parliament to reach. He built this crisis with his own hands, and his party, in 2022, chose to help him bury it rather than face it – buying him years, not innocence.
Friday’s judgment will settle a narrow legal question about timing and process. It will not settle the one that matters most to the millions of South Africans this newspaper answers to: whether a president who pledged to stay out of business, and a governing party willing to spend its majority shielding him rather than scrutinising him, can still credibly claim the moral authority to lead the fight against exactly the kind of unaccountable conduct both of them are now defending. That verdict does not require a courtroom. It only requires South Africans to remember what has actually happened, regardless of what the court says on Friday.
