Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - Cyril Ramaphosa is good at not being Jacob Zuma. The quality recommended him in 2017 to the 54th ANC conference delegates who faced an urgent need to fill a vacancy.
But as he reports to the 55th ANC conference in Nasrec, many will agree that it gave him only short-term credit with the public as errors in his indecisiveness in implementing party conference resolutions and election promises began piling up.
Ramaphosa’s other credential is not being like Jacob Zuma’s allies. The newly elected president emphasised that much at Nasrec 2017. He promised a new dawn, making traits that should come as standard sound like innovations when he reminded delegates: “The actions of comrades who are deployed by the movement should always be informed by the interests of our members and our people, not personal gain.”
He also said he would “bring integrity” to the party, acknowledging its absence under his immediate predecessor.
Then he kept individuals implicated in corruption and the maladministration of public funds in political office.
That suggests a low threshold of organisational renewal and integrity for admission to the party’s deployment list, or that he played with such words without knowing what they meant.
On those points alone, he has led in the opposite direction, showing that Nasrec 2017 has failed to unite and strengthen the party, and has not galvanised and rejuvenated it.
As he said then, the ANC continues to confound its critics. The difference is not in its successful record of implementing its conference resolutions, but in its failure to capitalise on its short term credit with the public.
There was a crass political logic to bringing back individuals with questionable integrity in political office, not even a repentant attitude towards their misdemeanours; hardly a chess grandmaster’s strategy.
The theory was that individuals from several slates needed a seat at the top table as a reward for allowing Ramaphosa’s ascension to the party’s and the country’s presidency.
Accepting and keeping these individuals in a bloated government payroll at all costs, even when there were opportunities to retire them, was an ecumenical gesture to unite the party, as it managed the implications of cutting short Zuma’s term in government.
“In electing the leadership, you, as the delegates to this conference, have turned your back on the politics of the slate.
You have insisted that the people who lead this movement should not be from one or another faction, but should serve our people in their own right as representatives of the membership as a whole,” he said at Nasrec 2017.
Some citizens thought that perhaps Ramaphosa also expected the party integrity commission to instruct these individuals to resign and that he might transition to put the party and the country in more capable hands.
Whatever the calculation, since Nasrec 2017 there has been no scenario that looks suitable for the president. Under his leadership, the party has fallen short of uniting the former combatants of Umkhonto we Sizwe and the ANC-SACP-Cosatu alliance, and ensuring that “its programmes are underpinned by unity”.
It has fallen short of uniting “the people of South Africa and working harder to heal the wounds of conflict and division”. The party leadership has also fallen short of implementing the “clear instruction that we must work together as a collective, undivided and motivated by a single purpose – the service of our people”.
By failing to confront these issues, he has wilfully sabotaged one of the essential foundations of the Nasrec 2017 platforms for no apparent gain.
Or he did it because he is blind to the primary motives of various factions in the ANC, in which case he shares them by also not being transparent about the sources of the CR17 campaign funding and the Phala Phala farm saga.
He offered himself during these five years as the nation’s servant-in-chief through catchy slogans, as an institution restorer and as a consultative steward swooping in to rescue his party after it got stuck in a hole of distrust.
That is his comfort zone and also his brand strength.
He is a diligent, detailed commander, which is what you want in a company director. But we assumed that was a strength he was bringing from his previous role, which he assured us he relinquished to concentrate on leading the party and the country.
Instead, we have discovered over the years that although Ramaphosa acquired a bigger office in 2017, five years later, he has not yet expanded to fill it.
The delay is costing him credibility.
He should, for example, have recognised that occupying the party and country presidency was a unique opportunity on the national and world stage. Instead of wriggling out of the acknowledged obstacles, he repeatedly subjected his leadership to the same problems.
A flaw in that plan has constantly been that subjecting the country’s interests to factional party politics pulling in different directions came at the expense of the citizens who entrusted their votes to Ramaphosa’s ANC.
Populist rhetoric without decisive action to implement co-ordinated socio-economic programmes to reduce poverty, unemployment and inequality is a way to stir public frustration while advertising the ANC government’s impotence.
Even if Ramaphosa did not feel any political urgency to deal with South Africa’s socioeconomic crisis early in his term, he should have heeded the private advice of his predecessors soon enough. They recently criticised him for weak leadership.
After five years and two elections, South African politics has cycled back to where it started in Nasrec 2017, but is much meaner and poorer financially and in human capital. All for what? Where did the journey take us?
From a perennially struggling economy, fast deteriorating living standards to decaying infrastructure and a long string of state companies that are gasping their last breath, to rage and systematic looting, deepening societal divisions and the downgrading of South Africa’s investment status by international agencies.
A handful of years have been wasted under Ramaphosa’s leadership, even though saying so is not blaming him alone for the crisis. The overwhelming lack of leadership in South Africa has put us on a crusade whipped up by self-serving, racist, and xenophobic extremists.
They are purportedly leading us to a better territory of the rainbow nation that does not exist, to fight an enemy that was our friend all along, defeating no one but ourselves.
Nyembezi is a policy analyst and human rights activist
Cape Times