EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | Can the ANC risk putting Ramaphosa’s face on its 2024 elections posters?

Even though some of us warned Ramaphoria addicts back in 2017 already that president Cyril Ramaphosa doesn’t have a magic wand with which to fix a broken ANC, most of us naysayers nevertheless took for granted that “brand Ramaphosa” is, however, stronger than ‘"brand ANC”.

Ramaphosa’s presidency has been such a monumental let-down, however, that I wouldn’t bet any money on a fresh, rigorous, political poll showing Ramaphosa to be more popular than the ANC, still.

In the best-case scenario, I would predict that Ramaphosa is now — as we speak — as untrustworthy as the ANC.

In the worst-case scenario, disappointment in him might just be so massive, because he was deemed to have capabilities he never had, that he may even be trusted less now than the ANC as an organisation. That is how bad the pedestrian, and often constitutionally irresponsible, Mr Ramaphosa’s time in office has been.

This raises a bloody awkward question: broken as the ANC is, will it help them having posters of lacklustre Ramaphosa plastered on poles and walls and outdoor electric boxes across the country over the next year?

I am suddenly not so sure of an obvious answer to this question and would imagine that the elections team at Luthuli House must be debating it, as well as both the national executive committee and the national working committee, the two most important national ANC decision-making, and day-to-day operations, structures between elective conferences.

So ... should the ANC take it as a given that Ramaphosa must be their candidate for presidency and, derivatively, their poster child – literally – as they contest the elections next year?

Let me try to explain this dilemma as fully as possible including, yes, the obvious reality that this is a choice between apples of various degrees of rot. I do not promise to have the skill to solve such a massive political dilemma as the one I am about to explain. But here goes.

There is no convincing positive case in favour of Ramaphosa staying on as president. None. The economy is not going to grow more than 2% per annum for each of the next few years. Unemployment under his leadership has not been meaningfully addressed, with youth unemployment in particular a direct and serious threat to our democracy, if those restless energies are manipulated by political opportunists. And all of this quite apart from the moral shame on us all for letting a generation of young people waste away due to zero opportunities for self-actualisation and meaningful participation in the life of our democracy.

Not only has crime remained a national sport, but the kinds of crime that we normally associate with gangster or mafia states are now becoming everyday news items in South Africa, ranging from kidnapping of school children to political assassinations, and as shown in the Sunday Times recently, murders in cities where criminal syndicates are fighting to access mining wealth. And I am only stopping this paragraph of excruciating state-aided decay and constitutional neglect out of sheer exhaustion from the lost Ramaphosa years. He is uninterested in being president, scared of pissing anyone off, wants to be loved by all parts of the ANC, and thinks that decisiveness is anathema to executive leadership. Why on earth did he even sign up for the job — to have it cited in his obituary one day? 

Besides lost opportunities, it is also important to recognise that Ramaphosa has neglected his official duties very often. For example, the public broadcaster does not have a board in place at the moment. The board is legally and practically intrinsic to the successful running of the public broadcaster. Parliament has done its job to make a recommendation of who the new board should consist of. But Ramaphosa could not care for the governance consequences, let alone the anti-democratic ripple-effects of not confirming the names sent to him by parliament. He is thereby not only being his now infamous tardy and indecisive self. He is simultaneously also undermining the doctrine of separation of powers by effectively vetoing parliament. That is sheer constitutional delinquency.

An overly ambitious candidate is bad news. However, a candidate who is lame is also bad news. Mr Ramaphosa is lame. Should you then risk having him sheepishly spearhead the election campaign? Methinks not

Should a constitutional delinquent, or someone averse to taking decisions (even bad ones for that matter), be your presidential candidate? Should you put their face on your campaign posters across the country? I cannot see the argument in favour of a clear affirmative response to these awkward questions that the ANC must force itself to think through as it battles the prospect of getting less than 50% of the share of the national vote next year.

As I said to a mate the other day, besides all of these fact-based critiques about his poor record in office, including problems related specifically to his job as president, the ultimate problem for the party now is that Ramaphosa himself does not think he should be the president of the country anymore. How can we forget that he wanted to resign after the Phala Phala scandal came to light? He reasoned – to his credit quite frankly – that it was both unethical and politically imprudent for the party to have him stay on as president of the country.

His last opportunity to salvage a record of years of mediocrity and disappointment would have been to demonstrate the power of self-examination as a political leader by setting the standard for political ethics in a world in which ethics and politics are never found in the same WhatsApp group. But, again, his meekness got the better of him, and self-serving provincial leaders and cabinet ministers, scared of having to resign with him, persuaded him, on false premises, that he had no choice but to stay on. He did so erroneously.

But what his friends cannot undo, however, is that we the voters now know that Ramaphosa, by his own reckoning, thinks he is not fit to stay on as president. Why should voters vote for someone who told us that he doesn’t think or want to be our president anymore? That is a difficulty opposition parties should exploit in the lead-up to the elections. An overly ambitious candidate is bad news. However, a candidate who is lame is also bad news. Mr Ramaphosa is lame. Should you then risk having him sheepishly spearhead the election campaign? Methinks not.

The hope was that Ramaphosa would have the space to reform the state in the direction of the constitution he had helped to negotiate. That, we now know, has not happened. The Ramaphoria addicts failed to appreciate just how deep the networks of criminality are within the state, and within the party, such that Ramaphosa was always going to have a tough time. That was worsened by his lack of political courage.

Now the ANC finds itself in the precarious electoral position, as we saw after the last local government elections, that Ramaphosa will not necessarily bring new voters to the party or fire-up traditional ANC voters who may be tempted to stay away from the polls in 2024. The working assumption that he could both energise the ANC base and steal votes away from parties like the DA or even the EFF has been defeated by facts to the contrary. Ramaphosa is no vote catcher.

That may not be the end of the world if other parties do not grow. The worry now, however, is that he may even turn off some of the voting base and then we are in the territory of uncertain electoral mathematical permutations provincially in closely fought geographies like Gauteng, even, if opposition parties get their base supporters more enthused about voting and not staying away than the ANC leadership may.

Again, this raises the recurring question of this analysis piece: is Ramaphosa obviously the right choice to be the national face of the ANC? We are not quite a federal state and so we cannot pretend that the incumbent national party can simply focus disproportionally on province-based campaigns. It needs the presidential candidate to be a trusted face. It is not clear that Ramaphosa and trust obviously go together at this time.

Right now we need not so much zen energy but a combination of a clear vision for an alternative to the status quo: sharp and creative, but feasible and well-founded ideas to end our most pressing problems and, crucially, political courage to challenge one’s own comrades

This leaves Ramaphosa supporters within the NWC and the NEC with the worst possible retort: “There is no one else!” That is a concession that the ANC as a whole is rudderless, lacking in talent, and with no one ready to lead a team to fix the state since the current guy couldn’t, and his weaknesses will not disappear suddenly.

To demand Ramaphosa be the main face of the party, despite objective analysis about his deep and irredeemable political and leadership flaws, is simply to give up on the party itself. Perhaps that is an unintentionally honest concession that the ANC has expired?

Of course, there are many tripartite politicians, and ordinary members of the ANC, activists included, who will not allow themselves and this once proud organisation to implode so readily, and so finally. They would have to start wrestling then with a post-Ramaphosa reality that needs to be prepared for now already. The starting point is to accept that all of the apples are rotten, but to choose one that can have a decent amount of nourishing portions of apple left after the rotten bit is cut off. And to let that person be the presidential candidate or to let Ramaphosa be on the posters but then be recalled soon afterwards. Who could such a candidate be? I honestly have no clue.

The constitutional choice to consider as the first alternative to Ramaphosa would have to be Paul Mashatile. The problem is that Mashatile has his own bag of strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, and this may sound shallow to some people but matters in a world in which humans rather than machines are voting, Mashatile has an unoffensive, and almost charming even, calm manner. If Fikile Mbalula is too noisy at times, Mashatile has zen energy.

With so much hypermasculinity in our politics, including from opposition party leaders, Mashatile’s boyishness and calm will land well initially. The problem is that if you put aesthetics aside, he is in trouble. In debates about how to solve energy insecurity, break the back of criminal networks in various parts of our lives, grow the economy and deal with asset, wealth and income inequalities, I don’t think he will sound any more impressive than the incumbent, Mr Ramaphosa.

Yet, right now we need not so much zen energy but a combination of a clear vision for an alternative to the status quo: sharp and creative, but feasible and well-founded ideas to end our most pressing problems and, crucially, political courage to challenge one’s own comrades and to win the argument inside your own party that putting the country first really is in the best interest of one’s party.

I do not have any ANC names that come to mind that meet these requirements.