/ 1 July 1994

The poet who didn’t want to be premier

The loneliness of the politician was one reason Ramathlodi was unwilling to be one.

The premier of the Northern Transvaal says he can’t walk to the corner store to buy a newspaper. But Ramathlodi has opened the door of his temporary office in Pietersburg — for merely a scout hall — to everyone. Unannounced visitors are asked by the receptionist to “give the premier ten minutes”. Exactly ten minutes later, he ignores the incessant ringing of his phone to talk.

His office is simple and too cramped for the constant coming and going of visitors, mostly MPs. It houses a desk, a government-issue lounge suite, a wall clock which has stopped and a large portrait of President MandeIa. A small, neat man, he is modest and polite — at one point reminding me to drink my tea before it got too cold.

Ramathlodi, at 38 one of the youngest of South Africa’s new regional premiers, has come a long way since his childhood in the obscure village of Tauetswala near Potgietersrus. Before his elevation to regional premier, he was personal assistant to two ANC presidents, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. But he is a reluctant politician.

It took some coaxing to make him abandon academia and resign as deputy registrar and assistant to the rector at the University of the North, he says. “I’ve always wanted to be an academic, and even as was rising through the ranks of the ANC my sense was I should not lose out on the things I cared about.”

A campus poet, he is a great admirer of Nigeria’s Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. He gets more of a kick from Gibson Kente’s work than from the plays of Shakespeare he says. But like Chris Hani — under whom he served — he unites the scholar and the hard-line activist in his spare frame.

Expelled from the University of the North for his political activities, he joined the ANC in 1978 and Umkhonto weSizwe in 1980 as one of the first MK recruits from the from the East Rand township of Tembisa, where he went to school. The township honoured him by renaming one its sections “Ngoako Ramathlodi”.

As MK commissar in Lesotho, Ramathlodi continued studying at the National University of Lesotho, where he obtained a masters degree in law. But his double life as a soldier and student had its complications: “I returned to camps in Angola every holiday when other students went home. As an exile, I didn’t have a home to go to”.

Whenever he went back to Angola he would “sharpen his military skills”. The region he now heads was, by historical irony, the theatre for military operations he once commanded. By the mid-eighties he had risen to the post of head of MK’s Political Military Council in the Northern Front, embracing the northern Transvaal. It is a region he now seeks to rebuild.

Ramathlodi fears that the ANC’s 96 percent poll victory has created unrealistically high expectations in the impoverished and backward north. But he is optimistic that they can “turn things around”. The fact that the north is the only province bordering on three countries presents development possibilities, he says. These include plans for a casino and with the co-operation of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Botswana — a tourist area.

Most of the Kruger Park lies in his province, he points out. He plans to develop the small airport in Pietersburg — it can land a Boeing 747 — to receive intercontinental flights and to deal with the overflow he expects from Jan Smuts. Also planned is the expansion of Beit Bridge to take increased trade and tourism from the north. Ramathlodi is indignant at the exploitation of the region’s abundant mineral resources.

The mining houses, drawn by diamond and chromium deposits, have left “holes and no infrastructure”, he complains. Directing the fortunes of one of South Africa’s conservative provinces — it was the only area to vote “no” in the 1992 referendum — Ramathlodi has been careful to offer an olive branch to local whites.

“We have to remember that this is not just a region of Africans. There are other people, and I would not want to make them uncomfortable.” He offered the Freedom Front a cabinet post, which they accepted, a gesture he did not extend to the National Party.

And there are signs that his personable-style is winning over the right — he takes satisfaction from the fact that Volkstaat signs are coming down throughout the region. But he cautions: “They bear the scats of superiority, just as we bear the scars a
inferiority. These will take time to disappear.”