Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa - forgive me, President Ramaphosa - is self-evidently a private and reserved human being. Since his decision to contest the leadership of the ANC, people have tried to double-guess every move he has made, or should have made, or is about to make. Worse than the attention, however, is his recent elevation to messiah status in the media and the popular imagination.
Messiahs are an expression of the need for the yoke of oppression to be lifted by a god-anointed action man who does what mere mortals cannot. Nelson Mandela was South Africa’s first messiah. He was seemingly born for the role, relished it, and given the massive damage to economy and society in the late apartheid years, almost everything he did was inevitably positive. The economy grew, rainbows were believed in, members of the national football team, Bafana Bafana, were football champions. Anything was possible.
In Ramaphosa’s case, the context is horribly similar. The economy has been smashed by the labyrinthine tendrils of corruption and state capture that have insinuated themselves into every aspect of public life, compounding those already present in the private sector.
For every state owned enterprise there is a private sector player like KPMG, and for every bribe that is accepted, someone else offered it. Zuma tended his corrupt garden well, and South Africa feels like it is the early 1990s again: political killings are rife in KwaZulu-Natal, the economy is in tatters, racial tensions are high, the poor are getting poorer, the rich richer, and the country’s sports people seem unable to win a game of tiddlywinks.
What kind of president will Ramaphosa be? The last 10 days should have answered part of this question.
Because of Ramaphosa’s chess moves the country has seen the true colours of everyone in the ANC’s top six leadership and beyond.
He and all South Africans now know where many of his enemies are. Those desperate to be reborn Ramaphosa-ites have become visible, and he knows (as South Africans do) who can be trusted and who not. He has forced people to play their roles out in public for all to see and learn, and better to understand the challenges he faces.
More importantly, the state utility Eskom has been completely reconfigured with a new board, and fear has begun to percolate through to all those eating South Africa’s public funds.
But the most significant moves were left to the very end.
Zuma’s last day as president - not in any way coincidentally - began with the news that the home of the powerful Gupta family had been raided and arrests had been made.
The second masterstroke was to allow Zuma to show his true colours to the nation in a rambling interview on state television.
Everyone was given a taste of what Ramaphosa has had to deal with.
Once Zuma knew that his time was up - his Gupta buddies being arrested, his son Duduzane being looked for and some of his lieutenants deserting him - he declined into self-pity.
For years the world has been fed several myths about Zuma. That he was steeped in strategy and that he was a master tactician. There was also the fable that he had dirt on everyone and would never be outmanoeuvred, that even a wounded lion is dangerous, that he may be down but never out, and so on. Instead, the terrible sadness of a crumpled bully was in evidence on SABC TV. He spent 30 minutes spinning silly yarns about the lack of accusations or evidence against him, insisting he was innocent, trying to blame anyone but himself. It laid bare the truth - Zuma is merely PW (Botha) rebooted.
Apartheid president Botha, nicknamed the Groot Krokodil (big crocodile), was a hardliner who refused to leave office and alienated everyone even in his own National Party. Zuma’s incoherent television appearance was an old jackal meeting an old krokodil.
Each filled with a sense of victimhood, denying any wrongdoing, both responsible for destroying the economy, the social fabric, and any number of lives. Ramaphosa left Zuma to show all South Africans his overweening vanity, his inability to distinguish right from wrong, and his arrogance. Shakespeare could not have plotted it better. Ramaphosa emerged as the true strategist.
Ramaphosa is no messiah, and when the post-Zuma champagne corks stop popping, South Africans need to assess him as a mere mortal.
Ramaphosa has a massive job ahead of him, in trying to reignite national pride, self-belief, and mutual trust. He also has to salvage the ANC’s reputation and win the next election in 2019, no mean feat in itself. The man, rather than the messiah, has shown he can move multiple chess pieces at once - and win.
The last 10 days have seen him completely eclipse his enemies within, having defeated those without when he was elected ANC president in December.
This will be a quiet president, in place of Zuma’s inane giggling and braggadocio. But as the saying goes, always watch the quiet ones
* Everatt is the Head of the School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.