PATRICK BULGER | State of Capture: Cyril Ramaphosa is a prisoner of the ANC

Many years ago, during the Codesa talks for a new constitution, Thabo Mbeki addressed an evening open gathering in Kempton Park where the talks were held. Gazing in front of him, Mbeki stood in silence, of the long and awkward type he often used to make his point. “Cyril Ramaphosa,” he intoned at last, “is not a veteran of the ANC.’’ Long silence to let that sink in.

At the time, Ramaphosa had almost single-handedly rescued the ANC from the bottomless pit of negotiations with the National Party government, after he was brought in to “break the deadlock” in the talks. He was the man of the moment, building a public profile even if his stature in the ANC itself was uncertain.

Perhaps Mbeki was feeling left out. After his deliberate silence, and as if to soften the blow, he said neither was he, Mbeki, “a veteran of the ANC”. That much was patently untrue, and the audience knew it. But the point had been made.

However, veteran or no veteran, when the ANC needed a skilled negotiator, it turned to Ramaphosa, who drew on his experience as a former head of the National Union of Mineworkers. When the ANC needed a “secret channel” to keep the constitutional talks alive, Ramaphosa brushed off his fly-fishing skills to sidle up to the NP’s chief negotiator, Roelf Meyer. It set a pattern for years to come: when the ANC was in trouble it turned to Ramaphosa.

As if to underline Ramaphosa’s tenuous standing in the ANC, though, he was overlooked for deputy president in spite of rumours Mandela had favoured him over Mbeki. Not content with a lesser role, he was “deployed” to the private sector. This was dressed up as a pioneering ANC move, as if he would show the way for others as the mascot-in-chief for black economic empowerment. What Ramaphosa’s deployment was meant to achieve has never been clear, nor was it apparent how the ANC would benefit from this quixotic sideways move. If anything, it arguably set the tone for two decades of elite empowerment, lining Ramaphosa’s pockets and setting him up for the presidency in time.

Later still, in 2017, Ramaphosa emerged as the ANC’s saviour yet again, when he took on former president Jacob Zuma’s preferred candidate, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, at the ANC’s conference at Nasrec. He emerged the surprise winner, and a popular one too, the assumption among the public being that Ramaphosa was different to his colleagues in the ANC. He alone could save SA from the ravages of corruption and state capture.

It was wishful thinking though. Perhaps because Ramaphosa had no constituency in the ANC, he interpreted this lack as an instruction to “unite’’, which he did in his choice of appointments and in how he tried to foster unity among leaders who wouldn’t give him the time of day. Principal among these was Ace Magashule, who understood the president’s largesse as an opportunity to secretly meet Zuma and others in the radical economic transformation camp plotting his downfall.

The lockdown provided the pretext for an orgy of looting, which made Ramaphosa’s claims of cleaning up look hollow.

At the 2019 elections, where the ANC for the first time realised its time in power was running out, it was the beatific countenance of Ramaphosa beaming from billboards who carried the party over the line. But what ANC was he leading? Time and again commentators wondered when the “real Ramaphosa” would stand up, show his grit and get the government working.

Given the chance to appear presidential during Covid-19, Ramaphosa cut an impressive and fatherly figure. In March 2020, when he declared the lockdown, ordinary members of the public looked to him for inspiration in troubling times. We realised soon enough he was not as in charge as we might have wanted: his nemesis Dlamini-Zuma relished the opportunity to publicly reverse his lifting of the ban on cigarettes.

The lockdown provided the pretext for an orgy of looting, which made Ramaphosa’s claims of cleaning up look hollow.

Rolling back the ravages of state capture was meant to be Ramaphosa’s moment. He blew it, proving yet again, as he himself has publicly stated, that the ANC comes before all else, and certainly before the country. He made a couple of below-par appearances at the commission, unable to explain how he had sat as Zuma’s deputy through all the years of state capture. Who can forget his broad smile as Zuma conducted the “Happy Birthday”-singing cabinet?

He said nothing in those years, we were told, because that would have ruined his chances at becoming president, which was when the clean-up would begin in earnest. It never did. After his unconvincing showing before chief justice Raymond Zondo, he let it be known the ANC would continue to support cadre deployment, which Zondo had identified as the well-spring of state capture. How could he argue otherwise?

The Phala Phala scandal has ripped the last shreds of respectability from the Ramaphosa presidency. We’re told he’s our only hope, all that stands between us and a failed state. With the party’s national executive committee supporting him, and parliament reverting to its customary role of propping up the president through thick and thin (going against another forgotten Zondo recommendation), Ramaphosa is a prisoner of the party he presumes to lead.

He comes across as a Pik Botha of our times. Before 1994, Botha was the man who was wheeled out to put an avuncular face to apartheid, giving it an urbane gloss and talking up reforms even as securocrats plotted. If whites could have chosen a president directly, it would have been Botha — that’s Pik, not PW. 

Ramaphosa has been useful so often to the ANC that you’d think there’d be some gratitude and loyalty from his comrades. But no. Yes, they’ll vote for him if it suits their own agenda (which it does now) and parade him in public to show a more respectable and professional side to the ANC.

But they’ll never love him. They know, as Mbeki said all those years ago, that Ramaphosa is not a veteran of the ANC. And that’s all that matters.