AFTER the 2012 Mangaung ANC conference elected Cyril Ramaphosa as party deputy president, some of the first questions he faced were about his wide-ranging business interests. A review was started.

And when Ramaphosa became Deputy President of South Africa after the 2014 elections, many of these business interests had been shed — in 2013, he stepped down from the Mondi board and before that, on 16 August 2012, from the board of Lonmin, where the police had killed 34 striking Marikana miners.

Other business divestments followed, in compliance with the executive ethics code, and to avoid conflicts of interest, leading to a “complete divestment” from the Shanduka Group, according to the then deputy president in a statement on May 24, 2014.  

“In the interim, my family’s interests will be held in blind trusts,” he said in that statement.

Now President, Ramaphosa on Thursday told MPs that never quite happened.

“Initially, the intention was a blind trust. I do not intend to do any other form of business except in the agricultural sector [game and cattle farming]. In the end, no such [blind] trust was formed.” 

But all financial and other interests were declared, Ramaphosa said.

This was in response to a question from African Transformation Movement (ATM) leader, Vuyolwethu Zungula.

In the parliamentary disclosures, Phala Phala as such was not publicly declared, but game and cattle farming was, as Ntaba Nyoni Estates and Ntaba Nyoni Feedlot. Both also featured as part of directorships and partnerships.

As of 2017, the cattle farming Ntaba Nyoni Feedlot was valued at R6 070 450, while the game farming Ntaba Nyoni Estates had more than doubled in value to R120 735 000. 

Phala Phala, as such, was not declared as a residence in the public section — although it may be in the confidential section — of the parliamentary register of members’ interests that Ramaphosa would have completed as ANC MP and Deputy President from 2014 to 2017.

After being elected President in February 2018, Ramaphosa resigned his parliamentary seat, and since then has made his declarations to the Presidency director-general at the Union Buildings.

But Thursday was important on another level.  

After months of facing off bruising questions and disrupted sittings in Parliament, Ramaphosa’s tactics of invoking “due process” changed in an apparent effort to improve the optics.

“I have said and admitted there was a theft on the farm and I reported that to a general in the SAPS, who later informed me he had reported it to another general. I deny there is any form of money laundering. I have said it publicly, it was the proceeds of sales of game,” Ramaphosa told MPs.

“I have been a cattle farmer and a game farmer for a number of years. I have disclosed that here in Parliament and to the secretary of Cabinet [the Presidency director-general].”

None of that is particularly new. Shortly after the theft of dollars stuffed into sofa cushions at Phala Phala emerged in early June — ex-spy boss Arthur Fraser laid charges over the February 2020 theft — Ramaphosa told the Limpopo ANC conference: “I’m a farmer. I’m in the cattle business. I’m in the game [farming and selling] business. This was a clear business transaction of selling animals.”

On Thursday, opposition MPs finally could fire off the follow-up questions to the Phala Phala theft pending from the disrupted presidential Q&A slot at the end of August.