Clyde Ramalaine
CAPE TOWN - Every generation demands leaders who emerge from the people whose history one can trace and whose presence have consistently been felt.
Hers is no fabricated history. There are no blank spaces when time and space require change.
Yet change is never offered. It is always demanded. Authentic leadership is not born from thin air but the people’s rightful demands.
Demands wrought in/intertwined liberation Struggles, be it the worker’s cause, economic transformation, land quest or women’s triple oppression.
Authentic leaders seldom fear. They know the cost of leadership and understand the challenge of the people’s legitimate demands.
Lindiwe N Sisulu is no Johnny-come-lately. She did not join the ANC in 1991 but was born in the Movement. The ANC is her cradle; she was arrested and jailed for her convictions as a teenager.
She surrendered herself to the cause of the liberation of her people, not fearing what may happen to her since her lineage attests that fearlessness is a tenacity to let truth and justice stand tall.
Regardless of how long the ANC in 2022 in gerrymandering of questionable treasurer-general Paul Mashatile's involvement in the secretary-general’s office is feverishly working to orchestrate a particular outcome and delaying to afford free and open contestation in this elective season, she will emerge.
Her candidacy is not an if or maybe it’s an absolute certainty.
Her name has been called, and she has answered the call.
The idea of having Ramaphosa uncontested to enter the 55th Conference is an insecure CR22 factional pipe-dream.
If he is worth half a teaspoon of salt he must contest.
Ready to lead from the front a human, a woman, a mother, an aunt, a professional, a lady, an academic, an intellectual, a humanitarian, an activist, a social-democrat, and Soviet-trained soldier with over 50 years of unbroken service in the ANC.
A true veteran, not the kamikaze veterans as is the order of today where some refer to themselves as stalwarts while practising self-interest factionalism dividing the ANC.
Intrinsically and principally loyal to the ANC, she is the one that dared to implement ANC policy on the important Israel and Palestine land question.
For implementing ANC policy, she was in 2019 relieved from her senior Dirco portfolio because Ramaphosa always bows to the pressure of white power.
Under her leadership as housing minister, 4.2 million homes were built for the poorest of the poor.
She knows how to house the people.
You will struggle anywhere in the world to find another public servant having done that as a cabinet minister.
Sisulu, the actual corruption-buster for which she was sacrificed out of the Water and Sanitation Ministry.
Her proactive leadership uncovered over R3.5bn of corruption during her tenure at water affairs.
Her sin, she uncovered close connected ones to ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa. He reshuffled his cabinet because she asked why the police and NPA stall on cases against his faction of associates such as ANC Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane’s wife on the Amatola Water Board corruption cases.
Why no journalist ever calls Ramaphosa out on this is long no more a secret.
She is ready for authentic servant leadership. Ready to serve and help fix as they say in Latin maximum cubism [maximum mess] that arrogant and insecure ANC men made of the once glorious Movement.
In the solstice of the July 2021 discontent and uprisings, she was in Phoenix, present, to seek answers as to why Africans had to be killed by some Indian racists.
Yes, she buried the dead and comforted the bereaved, while Ramaphosa, until now, cannot bring himself to declare a memorial day for over 350 lives lost in one day.
In any nation, that constitutes a massacre and tragedy.
Yes, 10 Marikana’s could not move the incumbent to redeem himself.
Instead, he hid behind empty claims of attacks on his government when no single government building was under threat.
She had shown mature leadership to address the race identity subject in reference to the Khoisan indigenous people with her irrevocable articulation.
“When I speak of Africans, I speak of all black South Africans, and I am at the same time rejecting the apartheid notion that the Khoisan, the indigenous first people in our land, must be labelled “coloureds” and other names when the white colonisers' reserve for themselves the title ‘Afrikaners’.”
We can expect under her an identity commission that will afford people to identify as Khoisan.
She initiated and still leads the debate. An initiative for which a slew of hired academics castigated her.
However, the fulcrum of her thought-provocation is increasingly re-echoed from among others judiciary and ANC leaders.
Judge President Dunstan Mlambo, advocate Ngoako Ramathodi, Constitutional Court Justice Jody Kollapen, KwaZulu-Natal Premier Sihle Zikalala, and many more are now questioning the efficacy of justice as a quantifiable measurable instrument of transformation as delivered by the constitution for those on the fringes of society.
It is an indisputable fact that she set the tone with her “hi Mzansi have we seen justice yet” January 6 article.
It became the actual State of the Nation address 2022 since it dwarfed the tired voluminous verbose diatribe of Ramaphosa platitudes and empty sayings.
Her opinion piece exposed all the real house n*****s until they came to have press conferences demanding she apologised.
Her article brought in both lightweights and pseudo-intellectuals like Ronald Lamola and Snuki Zikalala, not forgetting the known factional kamikaze veterans like Mavuso Msimang and Cheryl Carolus.
It made others like the ever entitled academic Firoz Cachalia sick because she said what he as the academic could not say.
Today, her article is repeated by all and sundry.
Please read their subsequent, notice subsequent, opinion pieces and commentary evidencing a call for constitutional rethink.
Unfortunately, Snuki Zikalala has in this season made it his so-called veteran job to badmouth her in every forum, wholly incapable of engaging her intellectual stewardship.
He resorts to de-campaigning her with not a shred of evidence to corroborate his claims of her incapability to lead the ANC.
Ramaphosa decided to be more than disingenuous on the content and outcomes of their meeting.
He lied to have admonished her, resulting in her apologising for the article. Forty-two minutes later, the world knew Ramaphosa publicly lied and deceived all.
It did not surprise the traditional leaders in Polokwane, who told him in his face that he was a bald faced liar.
It did not surprise the people of Chiawelo on his two-week notice of Eskom promises or the Alexandra people he promised a million houses.
These all know Sisulu was not lying but South Africa's number one politician increasingly evidence a pathological liar. Unfortunately, that is the truth that still stands.
Sisulu approached the integrity commission and was not summoned to appear as the factional media lies led.
She initiated the meeting in writing a request to explain herself before them. It became a session in which she respectfully took them through ANC’s history of leadership—ultimately lecturing them on their ambivalence and hypocrisy on current ANC leaders, rendering them subject to factionalist interest claims.
She invited them to make their contribution and develop along with her NEC sub-committee input for the social transformation as a discussion paper.
She is leading in ANC standards, and a return to the landmark of ANC values is her flagship.
For those who still do not know, Lindiwe Sisulu recruited Cyril Ramaphosa in his downtown new labour attorney offices to the ANC. When they met she had just been released from prison.
It is now common cause that, he and his state security apparatus are listening in on our phones, taping our conversations and monitoring our movements because he fears this natural leader who far eclipses him since Ramaphosa is no authentic ANC member or leader but was parachuted into the ANC in 1991 from the white monopoly capital air-balloon of an Oppenheimer Urban Foundation.
He has never denied the claim that she recruited him into the ANC. Her mission is saving the ANC under Ramaphosa, where everything and everyone is up for sale.
Under her leadership, we will return to the solemn commitments entered with our BRICS partners and repent for the betrayal in favour of a Bretton Woods crowd that over the last few years controls South Africa with loans and contracts. BRICS will live again because they know in her there is someone trustworthy.
Those who don’t know, her late father in 1953 visited China to meet Mao Zedong and, as the Chinese say, Walter ate our rice and drank our tea and produced Lindiwe. Russia knows she is more than a cadre, one trained on their soil.
Yes, she is ready to stop the victimisation and vicious political attacks on black women, an emerging trademark of the Ramaphosa-led presidency.
She has been his clear target for more than a recent period.
His known grudge and obsession with having Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane removed.
And the unconscionable choice to reject Justice Mandisa Maya for the rightful chief justice position, to reward Deputy Chief Zondo who as is publicly known performed the worst of the candidates.
Yet it appears what put him into the big office is that Ramaphosa, who was mentioned and cited before the Zondo commission, ominously is left out to account for his role in state capture allegations that now must translate to investigations levelled against him.
With her in leadership, the rightful continental agenda of an Africa freeing itself from the shackles of colonial entrapment will rise again.
At SADC regional leadership level, many of those she led as chairperson of the intelligence committee cannot wait to see her announced. In Ecowas, they wait for her to stand.
We look forward to the union of the sisterhood of African nations where her call reverberates a clarion call: ‘South-Africa an equal among many’.
With her leading, Mzansi will be correctly placed in its Africa-Sister- identity with a dictum of 'an equal among many.
There will be no South African imposed exceptionalism, nor the abuse of an apparent biggest economy and infrastructure.
One of my critiques against Mbeki's African Renaissance in distinction to the original Kwame Nkrumah vision was that it too had a superior big brother South-Africa as the dominant reality.
A detailed preview of her resume attests to the uniqueness of being more than acquainted with most cabinet portfolios. No cabinet minister has served in more portfolios (7/8).
A diverse cross-breed of portfolios where she left her fingerprints of innovative and proactive leadership.
In her, we have a principled leader who fears nothing and is less intimidated by scared men who spend their hours on cheap gossip, desperately trying everything to taint her.
Representing a generation of transforming global women leadership, she is likely to bag the support of a black caucus, and the African diaspora is engaging her already.
Her allegiance to the ANC was never in doubt. She never left to join Cope like Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who participated feverishly in plotting the end of the ANC.
Sisulu never betrayed the ANC in values or character because she never worshipped a particular ANC president but stayed loyal to the ANC breast milk from her mother Albertina while sitting on the lap of her father Walter Sisulu.
Walter produced Mandela and hosted a youthful 15-year-old Thabo Mbeki in his house.
Sisulu ignites the fire and grassroots struggle of Winnie Mandela, the wisdom and smile of Adelaide, and the heart and temperament of Albertina.
LS22 is the true hope of ANC restoration, renewal, economic redress, and true women emancipation.
Wathinta abafazi wathinta mbokodo. Come the hour there will be a contest and Lindiwe is in that race as demanded by the people.
Ramalaine is a political analyst