LUCKY MATHEBULA | Why Rustenburg doesn’t reveal what SA really thinks of Cyril

The 2022 ANC succession battle has begun. The challenge to a second term for Cyril Ramaphosa is intensifying, even if there seems to be no obvious contender. What is emerging is a clear message from some within the governing alliance that Ramaphosa should not return. What these repudiations of his leadership of the ANC do not answer are the reasons he shouldn’t.

Ramaphosa represents an ANC whose drive is to rid itself of kleptocracy, oligarchy and corruption. He has modelled his leadership legacy around being uncompromising towards state capture and corruption. He has almost removed patronage and rent-seeking as normality in ANC politics. He has returned to government battered trust and reduced the chronic deficit.

What a Ramaphosa presidency seems not to have mastered is how to balance the noble intentions of his term with the established patterns of patronage that took root before he took over. Corruption and state capture survived because they became a political economy. They created value chains and parallel establishments, most of which were entrenched within the party’s mandating processes towards its elective conferences. The purchase of branches to influence outcomes has resulted in these becoming the domain of those who can afford the most delegates. 

This results in the type of leadership the ANC ultimately presents to society, men and women who are loyal to the slates that voted for them. Leadership has, over time, been about satisfying the needs of the investor and less about what will make voters happy. Leadership has been brave in announcing it will not bail out SOEs, even if their functionality makes South African voters’ lives better.

The booing of Ramaphosa in Rustenburg on Sunday has brought the country to a mayday situation regarding constituency voting. Debates on the electoral bill need to be fast-tracked to enable society to be freed from the tyranny of majorities inside minorities. Yes, the Sibanye strike has legitimacies when you are part of that conflict and understand it in its context, but that conflict cannot be allowed to be an abstraction of reality regarding our national approval or otherwise of our president. Cosatu has 1.8-million members in a population of 60-million people and a confirmed voter population of 12-million. Anger about Sibanye cannot be allowed to be anger about the president.

With the introduction of constituency voting, under which MPs are directly elected without due dependence of party line, public policy loyalty to society will be enhanced. Our politics will henceforth become more about polities and less about coalitions that are ritualised as abstractions of what society feels. Rustenburg needs to be tested through an electoral system if it is true the circus we saw represents what South Africans really feel about Ramaphosa.

Amending the electoral act should be expanded to include the demarcation of the country into constituencies. The 52 regions — eight metros and 44 districts — provide a ready infrastructure to start direct representation in parliament for voters. There should be primary seats that are not necessarily party political in character. The rest could be reconfigured to accommodate proportionality and other permutations required to mitigate the tyranny of the majority. As these reforms are implemented, the president should be given a prerogative to establish a national executive out of able South Africans, without having to look within his or her party. This would allow the president to form a government that accounts to parliament. In that way, Rustenburg will remain the side show it was and Cosatu and other unions will be the labour movement they should be.

Dr Mathebula is an executive trustee of The Thinc Foundation.