The re-election of a Ramaphosa-type leader in the December 2022 ANC National Elective Conference might be a turning point in the growth and maturation of the South African democratic experiment. It might bring some closure to a chapter of an ANC that seem to have not embraced that it is now part of the establishment and should operate at a level where it measures its success by how it advances the national interest, which it must now focus on defining, more than the narrow interests of its membership. The integration of the ANC into a rules-based order regulated through a Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, is the most critical of phases to complete the liberation journey of South Africans. Much as the ANC has conducted a liberation struggle to deconstruct the apartheid state into a democratic state, the templates that hold the administrative authority of the state and dominance of the economy by a few, remain intact, save for their repurposing to chase the objects of the new Constitution.
The embrace of Ramaphosa the person, Ramaphosa the current ANC President, and Ramaphosa the chief negotiator at CODESA between 1990 and 1996 with the culmination of the adoption of the Constitution, is an indication of support for what he represents beyond his party affiliation and history. The gaze at which society views a Ramaphosa-type leader is one that is beyond the exigencies of post-liberation reconstruction, but more of state-building and consolidation of a rule-based government dispensation. Only if decisiveness could be an area he takes interest in practicing as a critical skill to anchor whatever leadership style he is married to.
The systems approach quicksand that the 6th administration has been plunged into by a Ramaphosa-type presidency is a platform upon which the authority of the state will be imposed on society for posterity's sake, rather than the convenience of wanting to be politically correct and transformation popular. The antagonisms that characterized captains of industry's relations with the liberation movement have to start making way for the ANC as a governing party whose relations with power should demonstrate its understanding of mega taxpayer rights and their legitimate claim to influence the very state. The imagination of a South Africa without a Ramaphosa-type leader should be treated for its principled character more than its political expediency benefits.
To date, a Ramaphosa presidency has targeted corruption and state capture as cardinal enemies to the growth trajectory the economy of South Africa has chosen. Through Ramaphosa's Presidency, the legality and respectability of our constitutional democracy got foregrounded, including at the expense of dealing with the brutality that its stability might represent to those that expected a radical transformation of the templates of economic domination. As a catalyst of history, a Ramaphosa presidency will not turn in a positive direction on its own, it would require a selfless commitment to a social compact etched on the consciousness that big business should have of its historical role in making apartheid workable. It should always be unimaginable that the apartheid project could have succeeded without the collusion of big business and the academic media complex that gave it a scientific basis. Similarly, the post-1994 democratic state cannot imagine itself succeeding without the collaboration and support of big business and the academic media complex, and Ramaphosa creates such a trust bridge.
A Ramaphosa-type presidency has for a while been engaged in a process of co-existing with the power of ideological traditions that instructed the anti-apartheid struggle system to a level where the governing party declared itself a force of the left when it was in fact deep in a process of implementing one of Africa's foremost liberal constitutions. What the constitution has done to this tradition was to fundamentally overturn it to be accommodating to liberalism thus creating in-governing party contestations that sought to displace rather than replace a socialist orientation that was in retreat at a time a Ramaphosa-type leadership was in ascendance. The rise of this leadership type is inextricably linked with its almost umbilical relationship with what undergirds South Africa's constitution. The institutional framework supporting this leadership type is one that foregrounds the rule of law, thus procuring skilled statecraft, creative diplomacy in dealing with adversaries, functioning institutions to enforce the order this leadership is crafting into posterity, and the capacity for and of effective action to adjust when circumstances change.
The perception that the conflicts of apartheid beneficiaries and its victims are represented by those that want a rule of law-based reform of the apartheid system and a radical economic transformation cohort of 'revolutionaries' should be fractured. The resultant fault line should instead lie between those who seek to affirm a principled, moral, and legal transformation of South Africa into a legitimate state-run pursuit of economic justice. An alliance of social partners should stand tall in an uncompromising effort to declare apartheid-induced inequalities proceeds of the crime it has been against humanity. A Ramaphosa-type leadership should be jealously curated to represent this trajectory beyond the contestation for power, which is normal in a democracy.
The continuation of the de-risking of the ANC NEC to be composed of men and women that are in the NEC for and on behalf of South Africans can only be achieved by a Ramaphosa-type leader in the current phase of the political life of South Africa. Getting numbers of like-mindedness in the NEC that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, and that the redress of economic imbalances does not require a shift to the negative baseline economic performance, is what a Ramaphosa-type second term leadership might decisively deliver. A second term should in fact be about the entrenchment of a political context that elevates the centrality of the middle class in politics. Populism should be curated as the ANC's arch-enemy in favor of a pragmatic focus on what will change the lives of South Africans. The growing anger of in-ANC populists, which is in fact the result of not regime change (and economic) anxieties, but perceived declines of political connectedness based status, should be targeted by leadership for neutralization before it becomes new nostalgia driving factionalism.
The truth is that through a president who carries social capital to curate a path to justice and political stability, society can only be disciplined into a path in which all work for the nation's prosperity. What the ANC now needs is greater exposure to external pressures to compete for the soul of the nation and not its member-centric protectionist barriers disguised through the inward-looking dogma of being nostalgic about its history. Instead of demonizing democracy modernization instruments such as constituency-based voting systems, and decentralization of in-ANC executive authority to match the demands of the country's Constitution, the ANC needs to renew its organizational make-up and enact into its Constitution policies that credibly enable its members to believe in their ability to influence their future beyond the over-exaggerated and self-importance of the ANC's otherwise heroic repudiation of Apartheid and whiteness in general. Working in and for society, through the 52 regions making up the functional government districts (including metros), should be a preoccupation of the new member in good standing under a second term Ramaphosa-type presidency should be about.
Nostalgia about the mass appeal of its immediate post-1990 policies has clearly not been the best of assets and political capital for its governing party role in South Africa. Whatever kept this nostalgia, except it having privileged those that benefited from its ritualization for history-attached access to governing party based largesse, otherwise later theorized and codified as corruption and politically exposed persons, has served to create an in-ANC culture that locked incumbents into privilege whilst ignoring the growing difficulties 'the people' suffered. The obsession with deployment did not help but made ANCness the new merit at the expense of the hard-earned right to be appointed on the basis of competence, herein understood to be an accredited level of knowledge, skill, and attributes. The protection of the incompetent through the rituals of deployment and no-theory carrying empowerment schemes started to distort incentive to perform in many that post-liberation had the most expectations.
Contrary to what the populist cohorts in the ANC's spheres of influence believe, the ANC has been gradually increasing its distance from society, and as a consequence recording lower voter turnouts that translated into the loss of electoral support. Lower electoral support meant a decline in the legitimacy of those that govern by a traditionally ANC constituency that is a victim of a troubled relationship with what occupied society's endearment as its liberators. For all the claims that internal to the ANC problems are a manifestation of broader 'economic transformation' issues and its political woes, the reality is that the ANC might have over-exaggerated its social capital independent of the quality and brand appeal of its leadership to society. In fact, the ANC suffers from the imbalance of its belief of what constitutes leadership and what it ultimately deploys in a values-based leadership-demanding society. Its capacity to place functionally incapable individuals into positions that require higher faculties of cognitive engagement has for a while been of case study proportions, and at a cost of national development time. Not only did government swim against the demands of the size of an economy South Africa is, but these in-ANC beliefs in the abilities of its popular deployees, rendered the state weak.
In a context where the state is weak, systems do not display any focus on national interests, society does not show commitment to emerging as a nation without being narrow nationalistic, and non-state actors would fund their stop-gap role to levels where private sector efficiency becomes an autocracy society succumbs to. In democracies where this condition is allowed to thrive, oligarchs develop around politically legitimized individuals. The oligarchs (who might come from the private sector) become in such conditions the state. They privatize all that the state can do, and their memorandum of incorporating businesses becomes legislation of those private domains. The publicness of government and the state becomes a private-public affair whose success undermines the need for government. Unless properly monitored through freedom of the media like we saw in the exposures of corruption that preceded the establishment of the Zondo Commission, hopes of society will always be concentrated on leaders society believes in their personal integrity. It is therefore important for the ANC to understand that truths and/or lies peddled about its social capital wielding leaders is suicidal to its quest to capture the ultimate prize of politics, government.
This risky convergence of the public and the private requires an interfacing leadership node that understands the necessity of state power and the indispensability of private sector innovation. In Ramaphosa, whose social capital has been a substrate to the ANC's, this has to date been demonstrated to be possible.
Just because this type of leadership can be irreversible in its growth for the sake of society does not mean that the chaos that humanity can manufacture because of greed and sheer carelessness and its attendant political or service calamity which is inevitable is no longer possible even in a person of a Ramaphosa-type of leader. Generally, these leadership types thrive in conditions where society comes from the immediate wreckage of value systems it believes in. Out of these convulsions, and without vitiating the possibility of a Ramaphosa-type leader being in variance with the social change it advocates, tends to be in hibernation ingredients of a lasting order.
As the Ramaphosa-type leadership is celebrated for having been able to illuminate corruption and state capture as the greatest ills of our time and enemies of the development promise our constitution has with society, its decline and risk can come from within its protagonists. Working on this leadership type to go into the second term is an assignment that reluctant liberals within the governing party have abrogated to themselves. The capacity of this leadership type to facilitate the step aside of those that are in variance with it can not be questioned, if the rule of law is factored in as a condition. In the history of the ANC as a governing party, it has only been able to be decisive on what this leadership type stands for when President Mbeki asked his deputy President, in the State, to 'step aside and when President Ramaphosa asked the SG of the governing party, effectively its CEO, to step aside.
As at finalizing this rendition, the issue of game and cattle farming and its relationship with cash transactions and all that is attached to the Phala-Phala farm was dominating public discourse. What makes this a fascinating experiment is that it will show how this leadership type is able to address itself to matters of corruption, if the allegations ultimately carry sufficient weight to provide prima-facie evidence that the President can be charged, CUT!!!
ASIKHULUMENI!!!
🤷🏿♂️🤷🏿♂️🤷🏿♂️ Phew, Aredze
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