EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | Let’s talk about the morning after the re-election of Madiba 2.0

Let’s keep this simple and blunt. What will the ANC and our country look like the morning after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s re-election at this week’s elective conference in Johannesburg?

Firstly, the ANC as a political party, nominally in the driving seat of government, will still be useless. The state is technically not fit for governance purpose, and the governing party’s moral collapse, which started with the arms deal smear, is irreversible. Nothing that would have happened at Nasrec will change the direction of the party nor the quality of our bureaucracy. 

I say this on the basis of past and present performance. Go back to any post-apartheid ANC conference and you will find the same resolutions being adopted because, in the intervening years, there was no successful implementation of most of the party’s resolutions and policies. 

Without the right quality of people deployed to critical positions within the state, we will never grow the economy beyond 2%, get unemployment down anywhere near single digit figures, be rid of the tag of one of the world’s most unequal societies, eliminate inhumane levels of absolute and relative poverty, and all of this apart from the adjacent symptoms of governance failures such as crippling energy insecurity, increased water scarcity, high levels of crime accompanied by scary levels of gratuitous violence, a war against the bodies of women and children, and increasing levels of organised crime.

We are becoming less and less attractive as an investment destination, given all this volatility.  We can debate whether cadre deployment is part of the problem. Some even want to challenge the legality of the policy.

If you are looking forward to Christmas with Cyril Ramaphosa in charge, you are naively choosing to not see reality for what it is

I think, in principle, there is nothing constitutionally egregious about a governing party wanting to make sure people who believe in the mandate of the governing party are in critical positions within the state.

After all, if you won an election in part based on selling a particular vision to voters, you do not want to be sabotaged by folks not on board with that vision. It is a complicated debate requiring more nuanced framing on another occasion. 

The ANC’s problem is that it does not implement party resolutions to develop cadres who are technically competent, constitutionally minded and responsive to the needs of communities who have a legitimate expectation that election promises will be kept. Between 2012 and 2022, tens of thousands of cadres were meant to be developed for this kind of role following the Mangaung elective conference where the policy to inaugurate “the decade of the cadre” was adopted.

And that is my point.

Where, in 2022, is evidence of the ANC taking seriously its own rhetoric about only appointing people to critical positions within the state if they are committed to Batho Pele principles?

If that was true, feeding schemes would not collapse, children wouldn’t drown in pit latrines, civil society organisations wouldn’t still be fighting government to ensure every school is compliant with the agreed definition of what legally constitutes a school, vulnerable patients in need of care wouldn’t die at unlicensed fake mental health facilities, citizens wouldn’t be trading war stories about frustrating interactions with state facilities, and the overarching narrative of horror we watched unfold at the state capture inquiry would not have included bonus episodes located in the present. The ANC doesn’t do what it promised it would do. Simple. 

If you are looking forward to Christmas with Ramaphosa in charge, you are naively choosing to not see reality for what it is. The captured and incompetent state will continue to be there. None of the empirical realities of the status quo, which includes the indicators I described above, which demonstrates a slow slide towards a gangster state, will be gone because Madiba 2.0 is still around. Ramaphosa lacks the capacity to resuscitate the dying ANC, and so at most he will help it capture — maybe — somewhere in the low to mid 50% of the vote in 2024. That is the optimistic scenario for the ANC. It won’t get better than that.

Why am I saying so?

If no previous ANC president managed to stop the liberation movement from becoming a post-liberation predator eating its own, why would Madiba 2.0 succeed?

Frankly, if no previous ANC president managed to stop the liberation movement from becoming a post-liberation predator eating its own, why would Madiba 2.0 succeed when he is less assertive, less wily, less clear on what he thinks the ANC should be than Thabo Mbeki or even caretaker Kgalema Motlanthe? Why did he keep so many thugs and anti-constitutionalists within the state after he became president of the country? A useful summary of these leadership weaknesses, and the proliferation of former president Jacob Zuma’s keepers, are contained in Jacques Pauw’s latest book, Our Poisoned Land ( )More obviously, Ramaphosa no longer wants to be our president. Why on earth do you think he has a chance in hell to manage a deeply divided ANC national executive committee (NEC) or do better within the state when he thinks he should have resigned?

By his own reckoning and his own standards, he thinks his time is up. You basically have a disinterested guy in charge the morning after the last delegate had left Nasrec, forced to be president by his self-serving bullying friends who were motivated by a fear they will lose their jobs if he goes. This means Ramaphosa will be a lame duck and all his superfans will be sorely disappointed when the country continues to limp from one bad statistic to another. 

Not only is Ramaphosa disinterested in political leadership, but even if he was still remotely keen, the ANC is beyond redemption. If you don’t tune into the wall-to-wall coverage of the ANC’s elective conference this week, I don’t blame you. But do make time to explore an urgent alternative topic so we are not caught napping, “What will we do the morning after the ANC is no longer in charge”?

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