Johannesburg - After a bruising battle that engaged
ordinary South Africans in a manner reminiscent of the heady
combination of fear and hope that galvanized the country after
Nelson Mandela was released from 27 years of incarceration in
1990, Mandela's ruling African National Congress party has
chosen a new leader to try to lift the country’s veil of sleaze.
Cyril Ramaphosa, at present serving as a deputy to the
controversial and widely-despised President Jacob Zuma, is now
the shoo-in as the party’s candidate to become South Africa’s
next president in 2019, should the ANC win that general
election. Publicly embraced as the anti-corruption savior of a
country deeply divided by the sleaze of Zuma’s two-term
administration, Ramaphosa’s victory finally dashes Zuma's hopes
of installing his former wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, as his
successor.
Had Zuma been able to pull off a dynastic succession, he
would likely have lifted, once and for all, the threat of 783
charges of fraud and corruption that he has been dodging for
more than a decade. It would also have offered immunity and the
prospect of continued plunder to the brazen band of “state
capture” cronies he had assembled around him, who allegedly have
stolen billions by hijacking the revenue streams of South
Africa’s poorly-managed state entities.
Ramaphosa won by a narrow 179-vote margin out of the 4,776
delegates who eventually were allowed to vote after court
rulings in three of South Africa’s nine provinces invalidated
the questionable credentials of more than 100 delegates. Most of
these were calculated by observers to be supporters of
Dlamini-Zuma.
Despite the money market approval that greeted Ramaphosa’s
victory – the South African rand hit a nine-month high – the
country is likely to remain in political turmoil. Mandela’s
“rainbow moment” has long since been subsumed into a bitter
racial blame-game following the failure of the economy to spread
its wealth more equitably.
Ramaphosa successfully faced off against a woman who had
embraced her former husband’s slogan of “radical economic
transformation,” a vaguely defined populist ideology that
basically blames “white monopoly capital” as the cause of all of
South Africa’s problems. But his victory is not unalloyed, with
the top six positions of his national executive split evenly
with the Dlamini-Zuma faction.
Ramaphosa’s party-elected deputy, David Mabuza, the premier
of Mpumalanga province, is part of the Dlamini-Zuma camp and has
been accused of masterminding the assassination of political
opponents (a claim he has denied) as well as being tarnished by
numerous corruption allegations. Ace Magashule, the premier of
the Free State province, who now occupies the powerful position
of ANC secretary-general, too has been accused for corruption
and is also part of the Dlamini-Zuma axis.
At its core, the leadership tussle between Ramaphosa and
Dlamini-Zuma reflects the ANC’s origins as a liberation
movement. All political organizations have a Darwinian instinct
for survival at almost any cost. Revolutionary movements,
perforce, make for strange bedfellows.
When this happens to be a combination of such disparate
combinations as black nationalists and minority-race liberals,
communists and the religiously devout, captains of industry and
the poorest of society, the strain of retaining unity becomes
acute. Endless compromise, after almost 24 years of government,
leads to impasse.
Ending that compromise is risky, especially when, as is the
case of the ANC, the party has seen its share of the vote
dwindling from 70 percent in the national elections of 2009 to a
fragile 54 percent of the vote in the 2016 provincial elections.
Hence the division, within the ANC, between the Dlamini-Zuma
populists and the Ramaphosa pragmatists. These are two
fundamentally divergent visions of South Africa’s future,
contained within a single political entity.
But this is not simply a matter of economic ideology. The
issue that most occupies ordinary South African, according to
the pollsters, is corruption involving the Gupta family –
cronies and benefactors of Zuma – who are claimed to benefit
illegally from billions in tenders, as well as decreeing the
hiring and firing of cabinet ministers. (Both Zuma and the
Guptas have denied the allegations.)
To claim the crown, there are three challenges that
Ramaphosa, designated heir to the throne, has to perform – at
least in terms of public perception.
First, he must decide whether Zuma will be allowed to serve
out his term of office until the 2019 elections, or whether he
will be recalled, as was the fate of Zuma’s predecessor, former
president Thabo Mbeki. The compromise might be for Zuma to
resign with dignity, with private assurances of a presidential
pardon from prosecution.
Second, Ramaphosa has to be unequivocal in his support for
an increasingly beleaguered judiciary by ending the Zuma
administration’s appeals against judgments on issues of state
capture, as well as increasingly strident attacks on judges.
That means the urgent appointment of a credible judge to oversee
the commission of inquiry into the theft of state assets that
was ordered by the Constitutional Court.
Thirdly, he has to act decisively against corruption.That
means, potentially, the surgical excision of many within the new
ANC national executive.
That could be Ramaphosa’s biggest challenge. As one analyst
on the eNCA television channel said after the election, the ANC
of Mandela is now “completely flawed morally.” The ANC remains,
however, the party that wrested democracy out of apartheid. That
legacy might be enough to keep it in power for some years yet.
Do not expect its powerful people to go gently into the good
night of political oblivion.
* William Saunderson-Meyer is a South African writer and author of the nationally-syndicated Jaundiced Eye column. The opinions expressed here are his own.