South Africa’s President Is Unlikely to Face Impeachment

JOHANNESBURG — South Africa’s governing party, the African National Congress, is standing by its president, Cyril Ramaphosa, rejecting calls that he face an impeachment hearing over accusations that he kept a large sum of cash in a sofa at his game farm and failed to report a crime when it was stolen.

The decision by the executive committee of the A.N.C. was announced on Monday after an all-day meeting — essentially killing a report that had been prepared by a three-member panel recommending that impeachment hearings go ahead.

“It means the president continues with his duties as president of the A.N.C. and the republic,” Paul Mashatile, the A.N.C.’s treasurer general, said at a news conference after the meeting. “The decision that we take is in the best interest of the country.”

But the president is hardly out of the woods. He still has to answer to several other investigations, including by the A.N.C.’s integrity committee, the national prosecutor’s office and the public protector, a corruption watchdog, as Mr. Mashatile pointed out. And his bid to win a second term as A.N.C. president in elections to be held in less than two weeks is hardly a sure thing.

Mr. Ramaphosa has been under fire since a criminal complaint filed by a political foe in June alleged that millions of dollars in U.S. currency was stolen from a couch in a game farm, Phala Phala Wildlife, owned by the president. The complaint alleged that Mr. Ramaphosa never reported the theft and tried to cover it up to avoid the publicity — and potential legal violations — over having that much foreign currency hidden at his private residence.

A damning report issued last week by two retired judges and a lawyer said that he might have violated the Constitution, and recommended that Parliament begin impeachment hearings. On Monday, Mr. Ramaphosa filed a legal challenge in the nation’s highest court challenging the report.

Parliament is scheduled to convene on Tuesday to vote on whether to adopt the report and hold impeachment hearings. A.N.C. members hold a majority of the seats in Parliament. While they are not required to do what their executive committee says, analysts say it is highly unlikely that they will break ranks in what is expected to be a public vote.

The executive committee’s decision may be a sign of Mr. Ramaphosa’s strength within the party ahead of elections for the party’s leadership. The president is seeking a second term, but he has been under heavy pressure from opposing factions and is expected to face a tough battle to remain in office.

The elections come at a particular fraught time for the A.N.C., Africa’s oldest liberation movement. Its support has been waning. Its next leader faces the tall task of helping to boost public confidence in the party as it tries to retain its outright majority in Parliament in the 2024 elections.

Since Mr. Ramaphosa is challenging the report in court, analysts say, Parliament may delay voting on it. Mr. Mashatile said the A.N.C.’s 80-member executive committee was mostly united in the view that it was the president’s prerogative to challenge the report in the Constitutional Court, the nation’s highest judicial body.

But there was a lengthy debate over the content of the report, he said. Some wanted to reject it, while others thought its findings should be considered. Ultimately, he said, the committee decided the report should not be adopted while it was up for legal review.

Opposition political parties are planning to vigorously push for Parliament to proceed with an impeachment hearing.

Julius Malema, the president of the Economic Freedom Fighters, one of the opposition parties, said that if the A.N.C. voted against the recommendations of the report, “it will be showing the Constitution a middle finger.”

Mr. Ramaphosa has maintained that he has done nothing wrong. He said that the amount stolen from his farm was $580,000 — not millions — and that the money was the proceeds from the sale of buffaloes.

But when the report by the panel appointed by Parliament was released last week, Mr. Ramaphosa considered resigning, advisers said, under heavy pressure from his opponents within the A.N.C., as well as rival political parties.

Though his political perch seemed tenuous in the immediate aftermath of the report’s release, Mr. Ramaphosa and his allies have since come out swinging.

On social media, his supporters have questioned the impartiality of a lawyer on the panel, posting a video of her interacting and laughing with some of the president’s detractors. Rallies in support of Mr. Ramaphosa have been convened, and his allies in the party have suggested that those who wanted him ousted were criminals afraid of his anticorruption agenda.

They have also called the report deeply flawed.

“It’s a nonsense report,” Zamani Saul, the premier of Northern Cape Province and a Ramaphosa supporter, said in an interview. “It’s inconclusive on everything.”

But analysts say the A.N.C.’s rejection of the report could have consequences for a party that has already lost a lot of electoral support, in part because of rampant corruption within its ranks.

Many South Africans are looking at the A.N.C.’s decision to reject the report and wondering if the party “under Ramaphosa may not be as dedicated as it says it is in the fight against corruption,” said Pearl Mncube, a political analyst based in Pretoria, the nation’s executive capital.

The process for impeaching a president was overhauled five years ago, when the Constitutional Court ruled that the A.N.C. did not hold its previous president, Jacob Zuma, accountable for misusing public funds to renovate his rural homestead. The requirement for convening a three-member panel to make recommendations on impeachment was meant to inject a nonpartisan voice in the process.

But the Constitution gives the final say on impeachment to lawmakers, said Lawson Naidoo, the executive secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution.

“Ultimately, it is a political decision whether the president is impeached or not,” Mr. Naidoo said.