Eastern Transvaal Premier Mathews Phosa, in The Mark Gevisser Profile
When Mathews Phosa was at high-school in Acornhoek in the early 1970s, he and a group of students were given a chilling ultimatum after disrupting a Parents’ Day event: they could choose between expulsion or being stripped naked and lashed with a hippo-hide sjambok.
“Our parents were struggling to keep us at school,” he recalls. “And so we decided to take the punishment. But we made a pact: no tears. The minimum any of us got was eight lashes. But not one of us cried. I’ve still got the mark. Look, I’ll show you!”
Matthews Phosa believes in transparency. But for our protests, he may well have pulled down his trousers, right there and then, in the middle of his premier’s office buried in an ugly old Bantu Administration building on the wrong side of a dorp in the middle of a lush valley that is now the hub of the fastest-growing province in the country.
The choice he and his classmates made says much about their generation and the paradoxes of South African history. They are now lawyers, doctors and one go-get- ’em premier. If the incident had happened ten years later, they would have organised a school boycott, joined a self-defence unit, and those who did not become precocious members of Parliament would probably be card-carrying members of the The Lost Generation by now.
But the choice also says something about Phosa himself — something about his toughness and his ambition. Today, I am with him on a tour of greater White River. There is something about his posture that is classic political boss — Richard Daley, township-style. The way he snaps his fingers at his staff when he wants something; the posture he assumes when consulting with comrades: one hand holding a perpetual cigarette, the other thrust in his pocket, eyes downcast, voice lowered.
Then he is all charm: flirting with an entire hall full of nurses at a hospital, exchaging Afrikaans proverbs with the white councillors, beaming proudly at the democracy of it all when a wild-eyed cultural worker, in some far-flung township, comes bounding up to him brandishing a hefty document: “This is the Arts and Culture Task Group Report and I want to make an input! How do we make an input?”
A law graduate from Turfloop, Phosa started Nelspruit’s first black law firm and became one of the most prosperous black businessmen in the region: his enterprises included those township staples, a construction company and a mortuary. He left the country “when I received information that they were going to assassinate me because of my profile as a UDF activist and my work for the ANC. They were going to plant a bomb in my BMW. I had a 735. You see! I often joke to the comrades, ‘How can you call this a gravy train? I had much better cars before!'”
Phosa, like almost everyone else in government these days, is also a poet. His verse is archetypally rhetorical, although it has a rhythm about it that is sometimes quite eerily soulful. Perhaps this is because it is in Afrikaans. My favourite, entitled Ja-Baas, is about the relationship between power, corruption, and a certain genre of luxury vehicle. It is a parody of a fat-necked bantustan leader who sits straight in his black “Mercedes-Chrysler” as he goes to and from a beerhall-parliament. Via the Land-Cruiser years of exile in Mozambique (as commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Eastern Transvaal operations), Phosa has traded in his BMW 735 for the black “Mercedes-Chrysler” of premiership. In fact, the very car he now cruises about in probably belonged to one of those yes-men he derides (some of whom now sit in his cabinet).
But Mathews Phosa is no Ja-Baas. He is independent in his outlook and sharp in his criticism. The local government provisions of the constitution are “a mess! They fundamentally undermine democracy and the price is going to be high to pay.” Central government, in the first year of democracy, was “often weak and indecisive and not co-ordinated at all to the provincial layer”. And the Reconstruction and Development Programme is “busy churning out tomes and tomes of paper and business plans and implementing less and less. Jay is about to be buried under the paper!”
In fact, of all the ANC premiers, he has been the most outspokenly critical of the way the interim constitution divvies up power. He slams the limitations of provincial competency and calls for a complete overhaul of the Senate as custodian of regional interests. He has already broken the rules — with the frowning approval of central government — by entering the world of foreign affairs: he has signed critical security and trade agreements with two Mozambican provinces, and has also made agreements with a German province, Egypt, Taiwan, and Britain.
Phosa was one of the first four ANC exiles to slip back into the country in 1990 to begin negotiations, and was responsible, as the ANC’s in-house lawyer, for dealing with the tortuous indemnity and prisoner-release arrangements. A senior national ANC leader who worked with him then notes that Phosa is “a bit of a braggart. But I have grudging admiration for him now. His province has been the least problematic in terms of setting itself up. It was the first one to promulgate the necessary laws; the first one to set up productive relations with civil society. He quickly brought a wide range of groups on board, secured capable advisors, and has no problems with taking advice.”
Now Phosa runs a province that is at least as hot as the flamboyant trees beginning to bloom along Nelspruit’s boulevards. Sure, he inherited the region with the fastest growth-rate in the country (4,5%), but he is determined to push it further, and robust “economic growth” — rather than flaccid “reconstruction and development” — is his mantra.
Phrases like “investor-friendly”, “market economy” and “the stimulation of entrepreneurs” drop from his lips. There is only one way into the RDP — expanding the economy — and economic planning must be at the centre of all policy. Most impressive, he has just summarily fired the bloated boards of the KaNgwane and KwaNdebele Development Corporations, accusing them of “earning money for doing nothing at all”.
There’s something inspiring about the way Phosa works: the adrenalin is high, even if it does result in over 100 cigarettes a day, and the operation is hyper- sophisticated, down to the hour-long hotline he conducts every Wednesday night between six and seven, when people can phone in and get a direct line to him (last week the farmers wanted to know who was tampering with the rainclouds). I haven’t come across such efficiency anywhere else in this new South African civil service.
But there’s a shadow that lurks, north of Nelspruit, in the densely-populated Bushbuckridge; an ex-homeland area that has long been the site of strife — ethnic, supernatural (this is the Witchcraft Belt), and political. Deep-rooted internecine ANC conflict has become superimposed upon an absurd border conflict. Although the region is traditionally part of the ANC’s Eastern Transvaal structure, it was allocated to the Northern Province. Last year the two provinces agreed to shift it to the east; in return, the Eastern Transvaal would cede the Groblersdal district to the north. But negotiations between the two provinces and central government have been enmeshed in constitutional difficulties and arcane political agendas.
Just this week, at a meeting chaired by Thabo Mbeki, the bottleneck was cleared: transfer will be effected by month-end. But, in the interim, trouble erupted in Bushbuckridge, culminating in an incendiary speech, given by Phosa, on Chris Hani Memorial Day this April. Here, Phosa’s audience were rural locals. Away from the glare of the national media, he lost his slickness and got heavy, publicly upbraiding dissenters (people who wished to stay in the North) and allegedly calling them “mpanyulas” — a Tsonga word which translates as “arsehole of an animal”. One of those named, Shiela Sithole, is suing him for R300 000 in defamation damages.
It is difficult for an outsider to make sense of all this. Some senior Bushbuckridge ANC officials accuse Phosa and his right-hand-man, Minister of Finance Jacques Modipane (who is the local heavyweight), of Mafia-like rule through intimidation. Whether or not this is true, one thing is certain: read a transcript of Phosa’s speech at the event, and there is a street- fighterliness to his tone which would surprise those urban whites more accustomed to his charm.
There have been other sparks. Although Phosa denies it, former employees of the Lowveld News say he managed to get them fired by claiming they were “part of the old South Africa” and threatening to sue them. “I’ve watched Mathews Phosa change,” says someone who knows the notoriously dirty Nelspruit ANC politics inside out. “He came into this job a real heavy, not tolerating dissent, wanting things his way. But he has begun to mellow. He knows he can’t keep playing that way if he wants to be a national contender.”
After lunch, Mathews Phosa takes me on a tour of the R700 000 house he has built on the controversial High Over Estate set up by KaNgwane, just outside Nelspruit. The intention is to quash an article that had just appeared in the Sunday papers accusing the Eastern Transvaal’s ANC leaders of using “[the] poor’s cash on own homes” by taking advantage of a fraudulent bantustan subsidy scheme. Phosa disputes it and has publicly branded the journalist as racist and libelous.
The house is protected by a vast wall with a gatehouse, and there is an absurdly grandiose false facade into which is set one of the most enormous wooden doors I have ever seen. What troubled me about it was not just how public the ostentation is — it is right on the N4, between Nelspruit and the township of KaNyamazane, on the taxi route home — but how fortified it is. Despite the fact that his property has an exquisite view over the orange orchards of the Crocodile River valley, the house pays no attention to its environment and turns inward upon itself. It is architecturally paranoid, completely at odds with the open, charming and affable man with whom I spent the day. I remembered that, in his office, all his curtains were drawn at midday.
Is it possible to be a regional political leader and not be a “heavy”? And does it matter if Mathews Phosa is? I came back to Johannesburg, after time with Phosa, singing the praises of Nelspruit. If I were to buy a piece of land outside Johannesburg, it would be in that part of the world: not just because of the landscape and the promise of Sunday lunchtime jaunts to Maputo for prawns and catembe and a swim in the sea once the highway is built, but also because I think it would be a good investment. Mathews Phosa may be heavy, but he’s doing something right.