Johannesburg - Like Napoleon Bonaparte, President Cyril Ramaphosa faces his “Battle of Waterloo” in about seven weeks. The ANC’s elective conference in December comes at the most inopportune time for SA’s first citizen and the ruling party’s El Supremo.
His approval rating is not as woefully low as that of his embattled UK counterpart, Prime Minister Liz Truss, whose brief tenure in office is described by the public broadcaster BBC as being kept alive “hour by hour”.
Living on borrowed time, Truss is a dead woman walking. It would be a miracle if she survives a fresh Tory onslaught on a party leader for another month, perhaps a fortnight, or even a week.
President Ramaphosa’s rise to power was premised on a post-President Jacob Zuma “new dawn” – to use his own words. The heavily politically-connected Gupta family had been fingered by Ramaphosa et al, as the root cause of the country’s evils. State-owned entities had been milked dry; many collapsed or were on wobbly knees.
Eskom, the country’s supposed source of light, continues to operate in the dark. If you came from another planet, you’d swear President Ramaphosa was never the country’s 2nd-in-charge behind President Zuma. For the uninitiated, President Ramaphosa was deputy to President Zuma and served as head of government business. Throughout the so-called “nine wasted years” of his predecessor, President Ramaphosa occupied the highest echelons of the party and State alike. How he seeks to absolve himself of any blame is mind-boggling.
Throughout his tenure, corruption, the evil that all the politically connected seem to master, continues to plague our society, described by the UN as the most unequal on the planet. Under Ramaphosa’s watch, homelessness, impoverishment, and hopelessness have become the hallmarks of the “new dawn”.
Thuma Mina (Send Me), that early-days exciting mantra aimed at rallying the country behind a new broom set to sweep clean, has been tweaked by an exasperated populace to “Send Me to steal!” Within a short period of the Ramaphosa administration, it had become crystal clear that “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.
There are way too many societal ills that bedevil SA under his self-righteous presidency. The pandemic notwithstanding, joblessness is on the rise, according to Stats SA – and inevitably, criminality grows rampant, the country’s political stability stands on shaky ground, and alas, youth graduates are turning to the government’s social grants for survival.
President Ramaphosa is a pretty decent human being and an affable leader. His charisma has won him middle-of-the-fence voters, and his dyed-in-the-wool supporters swear that without him, the ANC would never have won the last general elections in May 2019.
In a nutshell, President Ramaphosa’s die-hard supporters would let us all believe the former trade unionist-turned-billionaire “has saved the ANC” single-handedly. Of course, that’s a load of plain baloney.
For, the reputational value of the ANC is second to none. Until today, some of the unhappiest supporters of the party continue to endorse it at the polls. But let me be a party-pooper: Despite his amiable attributes, President Ramaphosa is perilously skating on thin ice. Come the ANC December conference, he will be challenged like never before – this time, for a different cluster of reasons.
Since assuming power at the 2017 Nasrec conference in Johannesburg, the ANC’s popularity and general standing in public have been waning.
He is the most prominent public face of the ruling party. There can be no hiding that fact. When ANC staff is not paid their salary, it would be disingenuous to overlook the truth that a billionaire is their boss. In simple logic, when the ANC falters, we must remember that the fish rots from the head.
Under the unfolding gloomy circumstances, President Ramaphosa needs to urgently summon any of his trusted wise men or women to decipher - like Daniel - encrypted text on the wall from the scriptures, which, as a Christian, the President must be familiar with. The following are the words that the President and his inner circle ought to worry about between now and the ANC conference. They read: “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin”.
Like a soothsayer, Daniel interprets the legendary words to the beleaguered king Belshazzar, who had summoned Daniel to decipher the text, as follows: Mene means “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end”. Tekel means “you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting”, and Upharsin means “your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians”.
With all due respect, and in all honesty, methinks indeed “the writing is on the wall” for the President, who ascended to power amid much fanfare but, thus far, has delivered very little. Even as Daniel was interpreting the Biblical words, the Medes and the Persians had begun to attack Babylon, swiftly capturing the city and killing King Belshazzar.
The handwriting on the wall came true that very night on the day it was first seen. The Phala Phala saga has been spun away by an efficient presidential PR and multimedia machinery that some have likened to the effectiveness of Bell Pottinger. But the president is no longer the same exuberant man, full of confidence and utterly convincing with every speech or comment he made.
The “Medes and the Persians” within the ANC are circling the president like vultures. As the grass-root branches of the party continue to decide on their preferred Top Six at the December elective conference, a diverse list of candidates for the top job emerges. The president can longer hide behind the comfort of party unity. Unlike in the past, times have dictated that aspirant members be allowed to raise their hands without any iota of fear.
Every position in the Top Six is basically up for grabs. Lately, social media platforms are even flooded by portraits of relatively unknown individuals being proposed for the ANC’s National Executive Committee, a new trend underpinned by desperation for access to resources through power.
There was a time, not so long ago, when party leaders preached “renewal” and repositioning of the ANC in an attempt to halt the electoral decline.
Unity of purpose, a frequently-used punchline in the early days of President Ramaphosa’s reign, no longer forms any of the regular sound bites. It’s clear provinces are actively engaged in some kind of battering. Ka mina, ka wena. Loosely translated, my position and yours.
In the midst of it all, very little is said about what the candidates promise to do for the party, the electorate, communities and the country at large.
Lately, very little ideological discourse ensues within the party ranks. Even under the “new dawn”, scheming, plotting and back-stabbing are evident through random political interactions with staunch party members whose ambition remains largely unconcealed. Provincial elective conferences, such as the one in the North West, remain a subject of litigation in the courts.
It is a microcosm of a latter-day malady that has crept inside the once-glorious movement of Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo and many other illustrious individuals. Methinks it’s no exaggeration that there could be blood on the conference floor come December. The ANC conferences have come to mean all or nothing for comrades. They’ve become a winner-takes-all.
The mantra is simple – win or lose. And from this mantra, you snooze, you lose. Hence frantic campaigning is often characterised by a dog-eat-dog idiosyncrasy. Whereas President Ramaphosa came to power, paraded and parachuted by his backers as some kind of a “Messiah” who has saved the ANC, that aura of omnipotence is long gone. Long gone and leaving the President amidst many alien aspects of party culture laid bare, such as vote buying, leaving the incumbent leader like an Emperor without clothes.
As the clock ticks and uncertainty grows from one province to the other, it would be folly of President Ramaphosa to remain overtly sectarian in his handling of party-related discourse. To use a billionaire speak – not that I am one – President Ramaphosa has to start “taking care of the cents and let the pounds take care of themselves”.
In other words, engage with ordinary members whose unmistakable importance is practically seen around election time. That’s where party unity ought to be thrashed out, not in the rarefied atmospheres of Sandton and other formerly whites-only lily suburbs.
The need to engage with potential presidential candidates cannot be over-estimated, from Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, Lindiwe Sisulu and Zweli Mkhize, among others. When leaders exhibit the Wisdom of Solomon as they carry out their duties, so will their followers remain steadfast in their support as they show approval for servant leadership.
But judging by the hard-to-die habits of party leaders in the pound seat, my proposal may be deemed laughable. Hence, my conclusion, Mr President: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. Or, to borrow from Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar: “Beware the Ides of March!”
Makoe is a Freelance Diplomatic Writer.