CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — South African President Cyril Ramaphosa declared Monday that he will not resign, vowing to legally contest a parliamentary report that found evidence of misconduct, just hours after the legislature opened a formal impeachment inquiry into the concealment of a cash theft at his private game farm.
Ramaphosa’s nationally televised address came the same morning Parliament announced the creation of an impeachment committee, complying with a Constitutional Court decision last week that a 2022 vote by lawmakers to block the process was unconstitutional. “I therefore respectfully want to make it clear that I will not resign. To do so would be to preempt a process defined by the Constitution. To do so would be to give credence to a panel report that unfortunately has grave flaws,” Ramaphosa said.
The 2022 vote — cast when his African National Congress (ANC) still held a majority — nullified an independent report that found credible evidence of serious misconduct. The three-member panel had concluded that Ramaphosa may have improperly failed to report the theft to police and used his presidential protection unit to secretly try to track down the suspects, according to the Associated Press. The Constitutional Court ruled that the report should have been referred to an impeachment committee for further investigation.
The scandal dates to 2020, when a former head of the state security agency told police that more than $580,000 in U.S. currency had been stolen from a sofa inside Ramaphosa’s ranch. The president has denied any wrongdoing, saying the money came from the legitimate sale of buffaloes. But the independent panel found “legitimate doubt” over the source of that cash and cited evidence that the amount may have been larger than Ramaphosa claimed.
Under South Africa’s Constitution, an impeachment requires the support of at least two-thirds of the 400-member National Assembly. The multi-party committee must still conduct a full investigation, and no timetable was provided in Monday’s parliamentary statement. Ramaphosa’s ANC, while the largest party in the current coalition, no longer commands a majority on its own; his survival may depend on continued backing from its lawmakers and those of its nine coalition partners.
The scandal has significantly damaged the credibility of a president who came to power on an anti-corruption platform, following the decade of graft scandals that tarnished his predecessor, Jacob Zuma. Opposition parties and other critics have called for Ramaphosa to step aside while the impeachment process proceeds, but he insisted that resigning would “preempt” constitutional processes.