Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC win spells doom for Jacob Zuma
With deliberate timing, Jacob Zuma entered the conference hall where his arch opponent Cyril Ramaphosa, S.African President and leader of ‘the oldest liberation movement on the continent’, the African National Congress (ANC), had been battling against noisy elements, chanting and dancing at the back of the hall, to deliver his opening address to the gathered delegates of the ruling party.
Notably, most of the over 4,400 delegates to the 55th elective conference of the ‘party of Nelson Mandela’, held at the Nasrec centre in Johannesburg over five days, sat silently, waiting for the uproar caused by a minority of mostly youthful delegates from Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal to subside.
Several minutes into the conference, Ramaphosa was clearly bothered by the ongoing and unprecedentedly disruptive crew of pro-Zuma delegates, but soldiering on through the political report which the party leader is required to deliver at the beginning of its conferences.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa gestures after being re-elected as the leader for the African National Congress (ANC) for the next five years, during the 55th National Conference of the ANC at the National Recreation Center (NASREC) in Johannesburg on December 19, 2022.
It was at this point that Zuma upped the ante with his overtly late and disrespectful entrance.
With Ramaphosa attempting to push through with his speech, Zuma trudged with determined strides towards the ranks of delegates, the former president surrounded by a clutch of bulky personal security types and seeming to relish the moment – especially the uptick in noisy disruptions which his presence engendered.
KwaZulu-Natal party seniors eventually quieted the restive ‘anti-Ramaphosa’ delegates, who had been singing pro-Zuma songs, dancing on tables or beating on them noisily, chanting about Ramaphosa’s ‘Phala Phala scandal’, wherein US$580,000 was stolen from the president’s game farm in early 2020, and making a rolling hands motion, borrowed from soccer crowds annoyed by their teams’ poor play and demanding replacements from the bench.
The rolling hands motion is not merely connected to soccer, a national obsession more than a mere sport, but to the ‘overthrow’ of the administration of Thabo Mbeki in 2007 in a move which marked Zuma’s first major comeback.
A supporter of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa holds a placard during the 55th National Conference of the African National Congress (ANC) at the National Recreation Center (NASREC) in Johannesburg on December 19, 2022.
Mbeki, as president after Mandela, had led the country conservatively, but reasonably well, if from afar, as it seemed to ordinary people.
In his two terms he had made few major errors, with the notable exception of Aids and Aids-treatment denialism, which certainly cost lives and caused significant harm to the Aids-affected community, being in S Africa a significant slice of the population.
Hilda Mulayo, a veteran African National Congress (ANC) Women League and a former school mate of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, holds placards outside the National Recreation Center (NASREC) in Johannesburg, on December 16, 2022 where the 55th National Conference of the African National Congress is scheduled to take place from 16 to 20 December 2022.
But Mbeki had drawn Zuma’s apparently undying disaffection after Zuma had been “released from his duties as Deputy President (of the country)” by Mbeki to deal with Zuma’s “personal issues”.
These included a rape allegation and charges that Zuma had benefitted through kickbacks from S Africa’s much-criticised late 1990s high-tech arms deal.
In typical style, there was little in the way of shame or embarrassment over these ‘problems’, Zuma going into full fight-back mode, first winning in his rape trial on the grounds that, while he had indeed had had unprotected sex with the HIV-infected daughter of a ‘struggle comrade’, the act was, according to Zuma, consensual.
Supporters of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa celebrate after he was re-elected as African National Congress (ANC) leader during the 55th National Conference of the ANC at the National Recreation Center (NASREC) in Johannesburg on December 19, 2022.
Prosecutors being unable to prove it was not, he got off.
On the arms deal kickback allegations, Zuma managed to get a hold-off and, eventually, the withdrawal of the charges – to be reinstituted nearly 10 years later, under judicial authority.
Inside the ANC, Zuma had been hard at work at grassroots level, bringing his estimable personal charisma and anti-apartheid struggle credentials to bear.
By the time of the 2007 ANC elective conference, Zuma was ready, his acolytes from around the country led by hardline loyalists from his home province, all of them making the rolling hands motion, signalling that the ‘time of Mbeki’, and that of Mandela, was over.
The ANC had morphed from an anti-apartheid movement in exile, to embedded party in power, and next was to become the kleptocratic regime which imposed nine years of disastrous Zuma-led rule, deeply damaging S Africa’s economy and standing in the world.
The ‘time of the great stealing’ was at hand.
Supporters of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa celebrate after he was re-elected as African National Congress (ANC) leader during the 55th National Conference of the ANC at the National Recreation Center (NASREC) in Johannesburg on December 19, 2022.
Those who had fought for the overthrow of racist apartheid and the residues of 300 years of colonialism felt it was “their time”, with little sense that taking kickbacks was anything other than ‘business as usual’ for those who had been ‘on the outside’ all their lives.
Zuma’s crew swept all before them in 2007 and then again in 2012, by which time, as the four-year-long Zondo graft probe has shown, the ‘state capture’ system of organised and systematic thievery from state coffers, the hollowing out of police and prosecutorial capacities, as well as the crippling of once the world-leading S Africa tax agency, were all fully underway.
Ramaphosa’s ‘unlikely’ win at the 2017 ANC elective conference, facilitated by David Mabuza, now entirely out of the party top leadership, came as a shock to the Zuma-ists, and triggered the process of investigating and unwinding ‘state capture’.
Also coming into question with Ramaphosa’s come-from-behind win was the treatment of the state as a direct route to high-paying public sector jobs for pals, loyalty to Zuma being the highest priority and ability to do the job barely featuring.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa gives a speech to launch the 55th National Conference of the African National Congress (ANC) at the National Recreation Center (NASREC) in Johannesburg on December 16, 2022.
Following Ramaphosa’s shock win, key Zuma allies, like Free State provincial leader Ace Magashule, were telling their co-Zuma-ists that they had only to “wait five years, comrades”, referencing the ruling party’s elective conference which has been taking place over the last five days.
But the organised disruptions and Zuma’s charged and deliberately disrespectful entry to the 2022 conference notwithstanding, Ramaphosa received a significantly expanded endorsement, and enjoys a mostly supportive ‘top seven’ executive team.
The implications are far-reaching.
For one thing, Zuma’s attempt to show who the ANC really belongs to, has failed.
KwaZulu-Natal, SA’s most populace region and the largest in terms of support for the ANC, produced elements at the elective conference, many youth league members of the party in that region, fiercely loyal to Zuma.
They now return to their province, empty in hand of senior positions held by any from KwaZulu-Natal, the almost 900 delegates from that province having had none of their preferred candidates supported to victory, despite bringing the largest single body of delegates to the conference.
Mandate to vote
Another unfoldment has been to reveal the sheer and open ‘horse-trading’ which the ANC sees as ‘perfectly normal’ and ‘part of the democratic process’, but which saw branch delegates with a mandate to vote for Ramaphosa as leader reneging on those mandates in favour of another, Zweli Mkhize, as promoted by the KwaZulu-Natal ANC faction.
Despite provincial bodies in both Limpopo and Gauteng telling delegates from their provinces to follow their lead and vote for Mkhize – and others more acceptable to the ‘Zuma-aligned slate’, slates of candidates having supposedly been disallowed – many branch delegates stuck with their mandates.
Much of the hand rolling – in which even a dispirited-looked Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, ex-wife of Zuma and twice his choice for next ANC leader, indulged but obviously half-heartedly, as it seemed to observers – came to signify nought, but some political theatre.
Mkhize, as a stand-in for Zuma, the latter excluded from standing by the ANC’s rule that those formally accused of crimes cannot hold senior party posts, was acceptable to the KwaZulu-Natal delegates mainly because he is a Zulu.
This revealed the deeply regionalist nature of the ANC, which fact in turn was behind provincial party officials ‘horse-trading’ votes in a ‘you support our candidate and we’ll support yours’ manner.
This regionalism is, in the facts of S Africa’s complex mix of linguistic-cultural groupings, unsurprising: the country has 11 official languages, English and to a lesser extent Afrikaans being generally-used tongues across various ethnic backgrounds, with the nine other languages roughly reflected in SA’s post-apartheid provincial governance structure.
The voting for leadership posts in the ANC, whether in exile or in power since 1994, has always had an element of regionalism, as influenced by cultural-linguistic factors, which could more easily be called ‘tribal’ in nature.
The ANC, eschewing tribalism and racism, has never encouraged this underlying factor, and always battled its manifestations.
But the Zuma era saw a brand of revivalist Zulu ‘nationalism’ stoked by Zuma himself, that vying with equivalent forces from the nearly equally numerous ‘cousin’ tribal grouping of the Xhosas of the Eastern and Western Cape, along with much the same from other groupings.
The ANC conference currently underway has shown that underlying cultural-linguistic tensions have not gone away, 28 years into the post-apartheid period wherein such alignments are not meant to count for much.
For the 877 KwaZulu-Natal ANC delegates to the conference, from which Ramaphosa has emerged bruised but affirmed in his anti-corruption ‘clean-up campaign’, ethnicity counted almost for all – and in the collective rejection of that essentially tribal approach, some sort of significant transition within the ANC seems to have taken place.
Even with the final balance of the 80-person national executive committee yet to be determined, there is no doubt that the ‘era of Zuma’ is over for the ANC – something which most delegates, even some Zuma supporters, have been admitting openly.
Also, having played the hardest hand he had, including overplaying it somewhat in bizarrely extending, on the eve of the conference, the inclusion of Ramaphosa as an alleged ‘co-conspirator’ in his legally hopeless attempt to prosecute the prosecutor in his own corruption trial, Zuma has terminally alienated Ramaphosa and other powerful party players like Gwede Mantashe.
While Zuma’s dramatic entry at the conference’s opening may have seemed to some as a replay of Zuma’s ousting of a reviled opponent, as happened with Mbeki in 2007, the event turned out to be the reverse: it was Zuma and those who support him and his ‘radical economic transformation’ co-travellers, who were definitively dismissed as a major force in the ANC under Ramaphosa in the latter’s second term.
Party unity
Party unity calls may dampen some of the fallout of the misconduct, in party terms, to which Ramaphosa was subjected by Zuma and acolytes, but there will be some who may face expulsion from the party, much as happened to Julius Malema.
Further splits in the ANC, such as those which have followed previous elective conferences, are not impossible – but it is the KwaZulu-Natal elements of the party now in deepest disarray.
Howsoever the cookie crumbles there, the ANC is likely to see its support in the region wither as disgruntled young firebrands, such as pitched up as ANC conference delegates, are reprimanded, kicked out of the party or quit in disgust.
It is not considered impossible, by senior party insiders, that the time has come for Zuma to be severely reprimanded and maybe even kicked out of the party for which, like Malema, Zuma said he was prepared to die.
Some analysts have gone so far as to suggest a Zuma-ist party split off might eventuate.
But that seems a dead-end move politically, especially as the leader of such is all but certain to find himself behind bars in the not-too-distant future as his near 20-year delayed corruption trial gets fully underway in early 2023.
Either way, the back of the Zuma faction has been metaphorically broken at this ANC conference.
Re-elected to lead the party and country, Ramaphosa is expected shortly to reconfigure his cabinet, this time with fewer compromises to other power centres in the party, and with a free hand from party and populace to go after corrupt elements with yet greater vigour.
It was perhaps because the pre-conference situation was such that each side was playing, in poker terms, ‘for all the chips’, that Zuma and his cohorts tried so hard to ‘collapse the conference’, as some in the party observed had almost happened.
But that they failed means that, while Ramaphosa and most of the senior party players have a renewed mandate to fix their party and the way it deploys people to state posts, the Zuma crew face a country and party heartily sick of political shenanigans, all S Africans, among other depredations, enduring multi-hour electricity outages daily due directly to past failings of ruling party deployees.
The country and the ruling party members have conveyed clearly to Ramaphosa and his team that their job is not fighting internal battles against increasingly irrelevant factionalists, but to remove the corrupt and incompetent, in both ruling party and government, and thereby to remake S Africa into a functional state again. BY DAILY NATION
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