Few incoming national leaders have been dealt such an unpromising hand as President Cyril Ramaphosa. When he secured a narrow victory over Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma at the ANC’s elective conference in December 2017, he became president of a divided organisation administered by secretary-general Ace Magashule, a bitter factional antagonist.
In government, the legacies of Ramaphosa’s predecessor, Jacob Zuma, included an unsustainable fiscal trajectory, embedded corruption, imploding state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and a local government system close to collapse.
Ramaphosa probably imagined that matters could not get much worse.
But in early 2020, the world was plunged into an unprecedented public health emergency. Covid has deepened SA’s dire economic crisis and further entrenched its pathologies of inequality and unemployment. Recent looting in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and Gauteng suggests a society that is beginning to unravel.
The president could have become an isolated figure, clinging to power by his fingertips. Instead he has consolidated his position. He faces difficult local government elections in the next two months, to be sure, followed by an elective conference of the ANC at the end of 2022, at which he will most likely face a challenge to his leadership. But he is almost certain to go on to a second term as president of the ANC, and then to a second full term as state president.
What explains Ramaphosa’s durability? And what does the future hold, if and when he begins a second term as national leader?
An interrupted first term
There is little consensus about how to evaluate Ramaphosa’s first full term as state president. The troubling legacies he inherited, and the intervention of the Covid crisis, complicate any judgment of his achievements and shortcomings.
The newly elected leader moved ruthlessly to force Zuma’s resignation soon after he became ANC president, by threatening a humiliating vote of no confidence in parliament.
Ramaphosa faced the immediate challenges of stabilising the institutional and economic crisis that Zuma had left behind. The damage-repair operation that he launched was focused first on the core functions of the state.
Little more than a year after coming to power, Ramaphosa had prised out the discredited SA Revenue Service commissioner Tom Moyane and replaced him. Zuma-era apparatchiks in the National Prosecuting Authority were excised, and a more transparent process for appointing heads of the authority was created.
A second key priority was to repair the SOEs, which had been ruinously mismanaged over the previous decade. Ramaphosa appointed new ministers, replaced the most corrupt and problematic boards and moved some way towards financial sustainability. Fresh leadership was introduced across a swathe of other public bodies, including the Public Investment Corp and the SABC.
After these immediate gains, however, the pace of change slowed.
Eskom poses tremendous risks to the economy. Yet, despite various road maps, integrated resource plans and interministerial committees, the government only recently gazetted an amendment to the Electricity Regulation Act that opens the way for a scaling up of private grid-tied embedded generators. This is merely a paper decision, and the actions required to prepare the transmission grid for a new world of renewables, to secure fresh financing, and to regulate electricity markets are not yet off the ground.
Slow progress across the board is a result, in part, of the rot that has infested government departments and SOEs. But Ramaphosa also has an incremental or even ponderous approach to addressing corruption, in part because many of the leading figures who sustain him — and the ANC — in power are implicated in it.
As his recent testimony to the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture revealed, miscreants have been targeted for removal from official positions and SOE boards by the new leadership, but the ANC continues to influence, and sometimes control, processes of appointment.
While deployment committees may be divided, and they are often overruled or circumvented, they represent a key decision point in a complex ANC system that undermines the quality and probity of personnel across public institutions.
Ramaphosa has also taken flak for the composition of his cabinets. At first, he promised to slim down and consolidate the entire cabinet system. Despite bringing some departments together under the wing of a single minister, however, structural changes have so far been limited.
Many of the worst Zuma ministers were dispatched in February 2018, and further major reshuffles, most recently last month, have consolidated the president’s control over his cabinet. Those hoping for business-friendly policy, however, have been disappointed. Tito Mboweni, who recently stood down as finance minister, provided illusory ideological balance to an increasingly Leftist economic cluster.
Ramaphosa’s most senior loyalists show no signs of driving fundamental change in government policy. Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe has retained the partial trust of labour and SACP constituencies, but his foot-dragging will carry significant costs in an age of decarbonisation. Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan has not tried to shed the state of the SOEs it has run so disastrously.
New finance minister Enoch Godongwana is a known quantity, but what he is known for — the steady continuation of failing ANC policies — is not reassuring.
Ramaphosa’s newest ministerial appointees, such as health minister Joe Phaahla and minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele, are political allies first and foremost, and promise no change of direction. Only the drafting in of new defence minister Thandi Modise from parliament has brought fresh intellect and steel to the cabinet, and this has come at some cost to the National Assembly.
Ramaphosa’s early focus on investment was sensible, and was widely if not enthusiastically applauded. But there have been growing complaints from all sides that reforms to stimulate growth and employment — whatever they might be — have been too slow in coming, or are simply absent.
Proposing the creation of a capable and ethical state is apple-pie politics. Who could possibly object? But the concrete steps that need to be taken to promote competence and professionalism are politically controversial, and the involvement of the Public Service Commission in appointments — and a new role for a head of the public service overseeing senior officials — will not lift the current malaise on their own.
The president has meanwhile cherished his district development model, a vision of synchronised planning that would ostensibly bring all three spheres of government together. Such integrated development frameworks have to navigate an impossibly complex constitutional and political terrain, and enthusiasm for the model has waned.
The most striking absence has been any sustained attempt to retire political deployment as a central philosophy and practice of the ANC in government, and to replace it with a clear-cut policy for appropriate political appointments in the state. Deployment was a post-apartheid transitional instrument whose rationale has now passed, but it has become an anachronism that the ANC simply cannot let go.
The Covid crisis brought a halt to reform. Ramaphosa surprised critics of his generally cautious style by instituting a deep and extended lockdown early in 2020. A failure to predict and contain corruption in the procurement of medical supplies, and major shortcomings in SA’s vaccination effort, quickly brought heavy political costs.
Presidential and ministerial missteps, however, pale in comparison with the huge negative impacts of the pandemic itself, on the fiscal situation, economic growth, unemployment and inequality. Devastation has been wrought in the public education system, the early development of children, the justice system, and indeed almost every other area of public life.
Through the various travails of his first term, Ramaphosa’s policy preferences have remained a mystery. SA’s broadly parliamentary system of government favours centrist leadership because the leader’s legitimacy is drawn from that of the party or coalition that elects him to office. Even given such constraints, Ramaphosa has been reticent about deploying ideas or values to steer the nation in a fresh direction.
Some observers say this is a result of his political predilection for the "long game". Rising to the top of the ANC certainly demands reservoirs of patience. It is unsurprising that the teenage Ramaphosa startled his fellow campers at a Christian outing at Hartbeespoort dam five decades ago by saying he would be president one day.
After being passed over for the deputy presidency by Nelson Mandela in the early 1990s, Ramaphosa spent two decades transforming himself from ANC outsider to consummate insider.
The qualities a politician draws upon to become president, however, are quite different to the ones he requires if he is to succeed once he occupies the office. The long rise to the top can become a handicap: a series of debts owed, promises made, and now-burdensome constituencies embraced.
Electoral tests ahead
At meetings of the Brics group of countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA), Ramaphosa’s Russian and Chinese counterparts are largely untroubled by electoral swings. Our president, in contrast, faces tiresome electoral challenges, two of which are imminent: the 2021 local government elections, and the 2022 ANC conference. These interrelated contests are suddenly more complicated than they seemed a few weeks ago.
Ramaphosa’s appeal to his party turns in part on his assumed capacity to attract the wider electorate to the ANC. In the 2019 national and provincial elections, he led the ANC to 58% of the national vote and helped it to retain Gauteng — albeit by a whisker.
The municipal elections, scheduled for the end of October or the start of November, should have presented another chance for Ramaphosa to showcase his appeal. After all, the 2016 elections, under Zuma’s leadership, were a disaster for the ANC, stripping the party of control over key metros, including Joburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay.
The ANC’s administrative shambles, and the legal fiasco that has unfolded in recent weeks around candidate registration, have undermined this expectation. The party now has to scurry to prepare a campaign just as it is suffering from a collapse of party finances. The debacle over candidate registration has compounded these problems — with possible legal challenges around candidate registration perhaps even leaving it unable to field a full set of candidates.
The DA and EFF have struggled to capture public attention since Zuma exited the stage. They are both robust and effective campaigners, however, and they are well placed to capitalise on the ANC’s complacency and disarray.
The DA can move from the despondency that followed the botched forced retirement of Mmusi Maimane. The EFF, for its part, can build on its provincial election successes in Gauteng, the North West and Limpopo. In particular, it will be competing with the IFP to capitalise on the ANC registration debacle in KZN, where the red berets achieved an unexpected 10% in 2019. ActionSA and the IFP are also likely to make unexpected headway in Gauteng and KZN, and they are hungry for coalition politics.
The electoral impact of the debacle on the ANC will probably be cushioned by the fact that citizens are tiring of political parties and public institutions in general, and not just of the liberation movement and its leaders. There are many imponderables, including how many citizens will register and then turn out to vote. Whatever the outcome, it is unlikely Ramaphosa’s hopes of a second term as ANC president will be dashed.
The fiasco has been overseen by elections head Fikile Mbalula, acting secretary-general Jessie Duarte and emergency bench substitute Kgalema Motlanthe. Together they have brought about an essentially nonfactional and collective cock-up.
After some head-scratching, the disaster will be laid at the door of suspended secretary-general Magashule. It is Magashule — and others who have placed factional politics over party cohesion — whose antics have left the party so poorly prepared.
Culpability will also migrate down the food chain to regions and branches that defied new candidate-selection processes.
If the party does find itself unable to run a huge swathe of candidates in KZN, it mostly has itself to blame. Ramaphosa may find disarray in this province works to his advantage. We sometimes forget that Limpopo was the largest province by membership before Thabo Mbeki became ANC leader and the myth of Eastern Cape hegemony rose. The delegate dominance that KZN and Mpumalanga have enjoyed in recent years is likewise a product of politics, and it is not set in stone.
To remove an entire incumbent faction requires the building of a nationwide coalition, and the assembling of huge financial and political resources. Today there is no appetite for a huge battle, and money is scarce. The sheer complexity of building a national coalition in the time of Covid cannot be overestimated.
There are extreme circumstances in which party barons might be tempted to replace their president with a "third way" candidate after just one term. But Ramaphosa has not really rocked the ANC boat. While a few corrupt ANC leaders had to go, in order to persuade electors that the reform process is serious, there has been no threat to corrupt provincial and regional leaders. These are the real powerbrokers who can manipulate conference votes and build a coalition for change.
There are also few figurehead candidates to front a reconfiguration of the top leadership. While recently castigating DA leader John Steenhuisen for insensitivity to the deputy president in parliamentary questions, Ramaphosa took pains to remind his caucus that David "DD" Mabuza is lamentably unwell — and so presumably cannot be considered a serious challenger for the crown.
Treasurer-general Paul Mashatile has failed to win over trade unions or the "radical economic transformation" crowd. Like ambitious treasurers before him, he has been seriously damaged by the recent financial disarray in Luthuli House, and left politically vulnerable by the ethical and legal conundrums the office poses to its incumbents.
This leaves Zweli Mkhize, another ill-fated former treasurer-general, who was lauded as a tremendous health minister in the early months of the pandemic. Centrist and moderate, he would have been well placed to capitalise on recent discontent in KZN, the province of which he was once ANC chair and premier. But he has been deeply wounded by allegations surrounding the R150m Digital Vibes communications tender.
To accuse him of greed, as some have done, is to miss the point entirely. Such a clever and politically influential ANC leader could easily have become rich a long time ago, if that was his ambition. Money matters to ambitious politicians because no potential challenger has the deep pockets to fund a national campaign for the leadership of the ANC. Yet the diversion of public money to build the necessary campaign machinery, staffed by political loyalists, is a dangerous endeavour in this time of heightened public scrutiny.
What kind of second term?
If Ramaphosa is re-elected ANC president at the end of 2022, he will enjoy a brief window of political opportunity: there will be no further challenges from his party until 2027. Though a president never has a free hand, we may at last discover if he has a distinctive agenda for his second term, or a political legacy that he is determined to leave for SA.
There are signs that he is fashioning a more centralised administration to drive a reform agenda. Directors-general are being rounded up under a new head of the public service. Communications and intelligence functions are being brought into the Union Buildings. Operation Vulindlela may be expanded to further cannibalise the capabilities of the National Treasury and harness them to the presidency’s strategic objectives.
To judge by his previous preoccupations, Ramaphosa may consider launching three fresh initiatives, the first of which concerns agriculture. The share of the labour force employed in this sector is just 8% in SA, down from 18% in 1990. The average for middle-income countries is about 30%. Here lies an opportunity to address part of SA’s unemployment scourge.
Despite his famous Ankole cattle, Ramaphosa is a Joburg man. His second initiative may well be modest structural change to the machinery of government in an increasingly urban country. Asymmetric decentralisation could empower the growing provinces of Gauteng and the Western Cape; modified metropolitan governance could help drive the economies of SA’s burgeoning cities.
The last item on Ramaphosa’s agenda is likely to be basic education reform, an urgent need, but also a political hot potato, because it brings together 400,000 teachers, powerful unions, and tens of millions of parents.
Will all or any of this happen? We cannot presuppose that Ramaphosa has such, or similar, plans. If he does, and he wants to hit the ground running in 2023, he will need to set in motion the strategies, the reform teams, and the broad agendas for change in advance of next year’s tumultuous internal ANC politics. That means round about now.
As the great Scottish poet Robert Burns once observed: "The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley" — they often go awry. If the president indeed has great plans, will events intervene once again to prevent them from coming to fruition?
Covid has more surprises in store for us. The episodic deterioration of SOEs will throw up periodic crises. Beyond that, the future is uncertain, but drought, fire, flood, and violence are all on the cards. The ANC, above all, will no doubt find fresh ways to surprise us, and to lay ruin to the most attractive plans of its own political leaders.
Butler is a professor of political studies at the University of Cape Town and the author of Cyril Ramaphosa: The Road to Presidential Power
In spite of the chaos inside the ANC and in the country as a whole, Ramaphosa is likely to get a second term as president
— What it means:
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