Will S/Africa’s ANC fare better under Cyril Ramaphosa?

South Africa’s fiercest political fighting occurred inside the governing party. The African National Congress (ANC), a once heroic liberation movement, has now become associated with corruption and cynicism. The party once inspired hope across Africa and helped liberate black South Africans from white-minority rule. But ANC is now a shadow of what it once represented […]

South Africa’s fiercest political fighting occurred inside the governing party. The African National Congress (ANC), a once heroic liberation movement, has now become associated with corruption and cynicism.

The party once inspired hope across Africa and helped liberate black South Africans from white-minority rule. But ANC is now a shadow of what it once represented – bereft of ideals and broiled by insiders fighting.  

ANC’s rapid decline manifested in the last year’s local election, in which it lost control over the nation’s largest cities, including Johannesburg, Pretoria and Nelson Mandela Bay, after black middle-class voters, disappointed with the party, abstained from voting or jumped to the opposition.

President Jacob Zuma, in his final address as ANC leader, admitted that the party had been weakened and needed to be renewed. But he blamed outside forces and launched a bitter attack on the opposition, the judicial system, the media and civil society.

But Zuma was widely discredited that ANC called for an elective national convention to replace him before the 2019 elections to boost ANC’s chances.

The two front-runners for the party’s top post, Zuma’s former wife and his deputy, embodied starkly opposing strains in a deeply divided party.

Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, a medical doctor and anti-apartheid veteran who served in several roles in previous governments, has the president’s backing and that of many of his allies. 

Cyril Ramaphosa, the deputy president, has the support of some of Zuma’s fiercest opponents, business groups and middle-class black voters in cities. 

In a shaming rebuke to President Zuma, the party, last Monday, chose Ramaphosa as its new leader, positioning him to become his successor.

While Ramaphosa has received support from the business world, he will face serious challenges as leader of a country with 27.7% official unemployment, and where the economy is expected to expand by just 0.7% in 2017 after dipping into a recession this year.

The new ANC leader was a protégé of Nelson Mandela, who had pushed unsuccessfully to name him as his successor in the late 1990s. He was born in Soweto in 1952, though his family is originally from the minority Venda-speaking area of Limpopo province. 

He was a hard-working student and the first in his family to attend university, where he earned a law degree despite being detained several times for his anti-apartheid activism.

In the 1980s Ramaphosa was a trade union leader, and helped with preparations for Mandela’s release from prison, which occurred in 1990. He later acted as the ANC’s chief negotiator in talks to end apartheid, earning a reputation for being highly skilled and shrewd.

After leaving politics in 1996, Ramaphosa amassed a range of business interests including stakes in mining and the McDonald’s Corp. master franchise for South Africa.

Ramaphosa was on the board of directors at Lonmin, a platinum mining firm, when workers went on strike in 2012. Police opened fire and killed 34 of the striking mineworkers in what is known as the Marikana massacre – the deadliest police action in post-apartheid South Africa.

Ramaphosa was criticized for an email written days before the killings that described the strike-related violence at Lonmin as dastardly criminal and called for police to take “concomitant action.” A judicial commission of inquiry into the tragedy cleared Ramaphosa of any responsibility.

Ramaphosa returned to active politics at the party’s leadership conference in 2012, where he was elected deputy leader of the party. He became deputy president of South Africa after the 2014 national polls, and has since built a reputation as a “Mr. Fix-it” in government, quietly capable and effective in a variety of challenging roles.

Now the party leader, Ramaphosa finds himself in an awkward position. Two provincial leaders, whose careers have also been overshadowed by alleged corruption and who were considered strong backers of President Zuma, secured powerful positions in the party. 

Ace Magashule and David Mabuza, the party leaders in the Free State and Mpumalanga, were elected secretary-general and deputy president respectively.

Political watchers said cohabitation between Zuma as president and Ramaphosa as party leader will be tense given strained relations between the two men. 

But Ramaphosa, with a reputation for being sensible and outspoken against corruption, has developed a large base of supporters who are fed up with Zuma and the steady stream of graft allegations that have marred his presidency.

More recently, Ramaphosa began to distance himself from Zuma. During his campaign, He condemned high-level corruption as “treason”, in remarks that seemed aimed at the president.

He re-echoed the same pledge at the closing of ANC’s five-day conference on Wednesday, saying “This conference has resolved that corruption must be fought with the same intensity and purpose that we fight poverty, unemployment and inequality.

“We must also act fearlessly against alleged corruption and abuse of office within our ranks.”

He told the delegates that the party had approved the seizure of land without compensation, but he cautioned against undermining the economy and food production.

The ANC has been under pressure to redress disparities which mean white farmers still own much of the best land in South Africa, more than two decades after the end of apartheid.

“This conference has resolved that the expropriation of land without compensation should be among the mechanisms available to government to give effect to land reform and redistribution.

“It has also been resolved that we ensure we do not undermine the agricultural production or the economy – that is what is important,” he said. 

Opinion polls suggest that the ANC stands a better chance of shoring up its waning popular support and winning the 2019 elections under Ramaphosa’s leadership, whose core supporters are precisely city dwellers and business owners, along with the black middle class that had begun to drift away.

ANC officials, analysts said, will want to avoid two competing centres of power – with rival leaders holding the posts of president of the party and president of the country.

They said ANC may choose to sack Zuma as president of the country, seeing him as a political liability in the run-up to the election.

The decision to sack Mr Zuma would be made by the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC), which is its highest decision-making body.

This would open the way for Ramaphosa to take power and try to regain the confidence of voters amid fears that the ANC’s 62% majority is under serious threat. 

But it would be a risky move as it could split the party even further and ANC would fare worse at the next election, pundits posited. 

Some powerful allies of Zuma, including the new ANC deputy president and secretary-general, may resist moves to sack him.

Instead, they say that Ramaphosa would be better advised to allow Zuma to become tied up in his legal woes, effectively neutralising him.

The South African judiciary is robust and independent, and has put high-profile political figures in prison before.

However, any recall by the ANC would not have any legal standing, as the president of the country is legally elected by the National Assembly. 

If the NEC recalls Zuma, it would signal to Zuma that he has lost the support of the ANC – who is the majority party in the National Assembly.

President Zuma would then have two options. One is to resign as president of the country as former President Thabo Mbeki did in 2008. 

Second, if he refuses to resign, the NEC would then instruct the ANC caucus in the National Assembly to institute and support a motion of no confidence in Zuma and he would then, in effect, be sacked as president of the country.

Analysts argued that If President Zuma is not recalled as president of the country, it would send a signal to voters that the ANC supports Zuma and everything he has done during his term as president. 

It would also signal that the ANC stands by Zuma despite the fact that there is a legally binding decision by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to charge him with various criminal offences.