Finest political hour: President Cyril Ramaphosa has skillfully stitched together a broad coalition to hold the
political centre. Photo: Buda Mendes/Global Citizen/Getty Images
For the longest time, President Cyril Ramaphosa was at pains to prevent the ANC splitting on his watch, frustrating critics and even comrades with the compromises he made to keep the party intact.
It finally split along the KwaZulu-Natal fault line in May when ANC members loyal to Jacob Zuma worked unabashedly to help his uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party to win 45% of votes in the province, more than the ANC could muster at a national level.
It left Ramaphosa with the legacy of being the man who led Africa’s oldest and proudest liberation movement to the loss of its electoral majority.
The president is no stranger to the agony of self-doubt and regret, and had come close to resigning six months earlier after the Ngcobo panel recommended that he face impeachment over the Phala Phala scandal. One may have expected days of similar rumination to follow the humiliation of 29 May.
Instead, as the writing went up on the wall at the National Results Operations Centre, Ramaphosa found grace and resolve in defeat.
He quipped to then chief justice Raymond Zondo that he badly wished his gaffe on the election year had not been one and that the results about to be announced were indeed those from 15 years ago. By then his inner circle had been briefed without equivocation that he intended pursuing a coalition that would see the political centre hold.
That meant persuading the Democratic Alliance (DA) to enter into government on terms that were not only palatable to the party’s leaders and donors, but to the sceptics in the ANC, among them Paul Mashatile and Gwede Mantashe.
The skill Ramaphosa honed in years of negotiations on the transfer of power from the apartheid regime served him well as he manoeuvred the process to allow the MK party and Economic Freedom Fighters to take themselves out of the equation.
He even borrowed the term government of national unity from the 1994 transition, though it hardly applies accurately here. The insistence on inviting eight other parties into the coalition was a calculation to counter suggestions he had sold out to the DA, and to cushion the ANC in numerical terms if John Steenhuisen were ever to pull out of the pact. It was vintage Ramaphosa and it was the relatively easy part.
The cabinet the president named on 1 July showed more careful thought taken in assigning portfolios to opposition parties than filling those that remained with the ANC.
In sending Steenhuisen to agriculture and Siviwe Gwarube to basic education, Ramaphosa deployed them to areas of policy critical to their party’s constituency while burdening them with the past failures of his own party.
With the exception of Parks Tau at trade and industry and few others, his ANC appointments were less inspired. Assigning water affairs to Pemmy Majodina was, in the words of one of the president’s allies, “a disaster”, explicable only as a reward for loyal service in parliament.
There was no good reason for naming Thembi Simelane justice minister, nor for hesitating for six months to shift her sideways after the public learnt what was never fully a secret to the president or his party.
There was an untenable conflict of interest inherent in the minister who holds final political responsibility for the National Prosecuting Authority being a person of interest to the same entity.
It cast a cloud over a coalition Ramaphosa, International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola and the rest of cabinet have been selling to foreign investors as a fresh start for the country.
And it came as a reminder that the president remains a prisoner to the party he leads, its populist factions and ongoing negotiations with reality and probity.
The tentative agreement reached last week to resolve the impasse over the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act is a case in point. Compromise was not only possible but indicated months ago.
There was never really a need for Ramaphosa to suspend the implementation of clauses 4 and 5 of the law because it cannot be implemented without regulations and budget allocations, both of which impose a lead time.
That it took the cabinet clearing house months to come to essentially this realisation is as much the DA’s fault as it is the president’s. But there is a greater onus on him than on the former opposition. As one analyst recently said, now is the time to “be President Ramaphosa, be the adult in the room and lead for the people who want this thing to work”.
History may forgive Ramaphosa’s inability to rescue the ANC’s electoral fortunes if he were to make a success of the government of national unity and begin to turn around the economy.
He has three years left in office, barring an early challenge from his deputy, and the ministers closest to him speak of a true sense of urgency and concern to address the country’s worst ills in the remainder of his final term.
Ramaphosa is working around the weaknesses in his cabinet by centralising still more authority in the presidency and expanding the mandate, and potentially the staff component, of the Operation Vulindlela team.
He is wisely ignoring the criticism in this regard because the water crisis, among others, demands the same determination that ended load-shedding.
The president has similarly tuned out the grand-standing of his biggest coalition partner, keeping cabinet meetings steady and leaving it to his spokesperson to disabuse DA ministers who claim credit for achievements that were not theirs.
The drive to be effective in the time that remains extends to the international stage, and Ramaphosa plainly intends to use the presidency of the G20, which South Africa assumed at the beginning of the month, to maximum effect to campaign for the reform of multi-lateral institutions and fairer terms from international finance institutions for developing countries.
His foreign policy lacks the élan of Thabo Mbeki’s chimerical but seductive vision of an African renaissance. Ramaphosa instead speaks in terms of principled multi-lateralism and respect for international law, never missing an opportunity to accuse the United Nations Security Council of failing in its mandate with “a disastrous impact on the African continent and the Global South”.
Whatever Ramaphosa achieves in this field will largely hinge on how astutely he negotiates with Washington once Donald Trump re-enters the White House, and he appears to know it. The head of state has made a point of inviting Trump to the G20 summit and brought the date forward by a few days to 22 and 23 November next year, so as not to coincide with Thanksgiving.
Ramaphosa’s second term in office — and in particular the period since 29 May — has been marked by a number of such moments of clarity of purpose which were largely missing during his first.
A continuation of this focused thought and action during Ramaphosa’s final three years would be welcome: it both becomes the president and serves the country.