Balance of Power. Qaanitah Hunter
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and Motlanthe was employed as an education officer in the union after his release from Robben Island prison in 1987. Motlanthe then succeeded Ramaphosa as general secretary of NUM when Ramaphosa was elected secretary-general of the ANC.
At the meeting, Motlanthe laid out the reasons why he was going up against Zuma, citing principle. Although he effectively gave Ramaphosa his blessing, Motlanthe also warned him about what he was likely to get himself into as deputy to Zuma. By that time, there was so much bad blood between Motlanthe and Zuma that the two were barely on speaking terms, even in the Union Buildings. ‘Motlanthe could see that things were not going well under Zuma and he could not pretend as if everything was OK,’ said an old friend of both Ramaphosa and Motlanthe.
When Ramaphosa accepted the deputy presidency, he was aware of his own history with Zuma. Butler correctly points out that there was ‘no love lost between Zuma and Ramaphosa’ at the time.
Ramaphosa’s rise to the deputy presidency of the ANC was a real case of political convenience served with a good helping of Zuma-era slate politics. For Zuma, Ramaphosa was a political lightweight, having neither served the ANC in exile nor been imprisoned for his political convictions on Robben Island. His struggle credentials were, in Zuma’s eyes, therefore, non-existent and his role as one of the founding leaders of the NUM was treated with suspicion. There was a long history of mistrust between the two, who first came up against each other at the ANC’s Durban conference in 1991, when they both contested the position of secretary-general of the ANC. Ramaphosa won and Zuma became Ramaphosa’s deputy.
So why did Zuma and his allies decide to include him as their candidate as deputy president? Many of those involved in the discussions to bring Ramaphosa onto the Zuma slate have said that Zuma’s faction believed Ramaphosa was too politically weak ever to pose a formidable challenge to him. Which is why he made the perfect candidate.
At the same time, Motlanthe’s daring attempt to challenge Zuma after his first term as ANC president was seen as a nuisance and affront that upset a perfectly suitable existing political arrangement. The Zuma faction wanted to hit back and teach him a lesson.
This thinking was revealed and confirmed five years after the Mangaung conference when then ANC’s Mpumalanga strongman, David Mabuza, criticised Motlanthe, arguing that he should have stayed on as Zuma’s deputy instead of challenging him in 2012 for the top job. Mabuza told the Sunday Times in an interview that Motlanthe had created disorder within the ruling party when he challenged Zuma as the party’s leader in 2012 and ‘broke the ANC tradition’ by which a deputy president waited to succeed to high office after the incumbent president had served two terms. This was the argument raised at the Polokwane conference in 2007 when Zuma fought viciously with Thabo Mbeki, who was then standing for his third term as ANC president. Had Motlanthe waited his chance, Mabuza argued, there would not have been factional chaos in the ANC. ‘Yes, he [Motlanthe] created disorder. According to me, coming to this conference [the ANC elective congress at Nasrec in December 2017], it was going to be easy if Comrade Kgalema was there, we were going to proceed,’ Mabuza said.
There were other reasons too why Ramaphosa seemed to be a suitable candidate for the deputy presidency in 2012. To the Zuma camp, he appeared to have ‘the right amount of credibility and just the right amount of scandal’ for Zuma to obtain a tight grip on him. Ramaphosa would also come with support and legitimacy from the business community at a time when Zuma desperately needed to boost investor confidence in the South African economy. Moreover, he would appease the middle class and white voters, or so they believed. The Zuma group used Sihle Zikalala, the provincial secretary of the ANC in KZN at the time, as their mouthpiece to test this political experiment in the media. Zikalala said at the time that Ramaphosa would help the ANC relate better with business, intellectuals, and the youth. There was also the consideration that the election of Ramaphosa, a Venda from the far north of the country, would help provide ethnic balance in the party’s top leadership.
These factors along with the desperate need to defeat Motlanthe made Ramaphosa seem a likely deputy even despite the fact that Zuma had no respect for him. Zuma’s views of Ramaphosa had long been shaped by a political conspiracy theory that he had once been a ‘plant of the Boers’ and lacked the struggle credentials that Zuma laid claim to. ‘He was a mafikizolo [newcomer/lightweight] in the ANC … he just started yesterday,’ an ANC leader said, reflecting Zuma and his allies’ view of Ramaphosa. It was a sentiment that did not fade with time. Allegations were also made that Ramaphosa had been compromisingly close to whites during the negotiations between the ANC and the National Party for a political settlement and later for the drawing up of a new constitution.
When Ramaphosa eventually became ANC deputy president, there was a firm belief among Zuma’s allies that Zuma had a dossier on Ramaphosa that was so damning that if its contents were revealed it would expose him and end his political career. The secret ‘file’ was said to have details of Ramaphosa’s ties with the Americans and the ‘truth’ about how he had made his money. This, it was thought, could be used against Ramaphosa if he dared to challenge Zuma as president. Such a dossier proved to be a fallacy.
Lastly, Ramaphosa had been drawn into the controversy surrounding the killing by police of striking mine workers at Marikana, a mine belonging to the Lonmin group on whose board Ramaphosa sat as a non-executive director. Emails sent by Ramaphosa to the board encouraging a more effective response to the strikes were revealed at the Farlam commission of inquiry into the killings and seemed to depict Ramaphosa in a bad light. No doubt Ramaphosa’s consequent reputational damage was politically convenient for Zuma. As Anthony Butler has expressed it: ‘Zuma probably felt that Marikana left Cyril’s future in his hands.’
After an initial hesitation in December 2012, Ramaphosa eventually gave in to persuasion and accepted the candidacy for the position of deputy president of the ANC on the Zuma ticket. As a result he faced a contest with two of his political contemporaries, Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa, with whom he had been fingered in 2001 in a bogus plot to unseat President Thabo Mbeki. After ballots were cast, Ramaphosa received 3018 votes against Sexwale’s 463 and Phosa’s 470, and was duly elected deputy president of the ANC on Tuesday, 18 December 2012.
In a moment that marked a significant step in his political career, Ramaphosa went on stage amid loud cheers and hugged Zuma. He then lifted his hands with Mkhize, who had just been elected treasurer-general, on his right and Zuma on his left. Also on stage was ANC chairperson Baleka Mbete, Gwede Mantashe, who had been re-elected as party secretary-general, and Jessie Duarte, who also held her hands high after just being elected deputy secretary-general of the ANC.
Ramaphosa’s time in the shadows of political life was now over. His ambition to become the deputy president of the ANC was finally realised, although it was now as Zuma’s second-in-command, not Nelson Mandela’s.
As for Magashule, Mkhize and Zikalala, who were all part of the inner workings of the arrangement to resurrect Ramaphosa’s political career, they were satisfied that Motlanthe was now out of the picture and that Zuma was firmly in the driving seat once again. This victory in the 2012 ANC election race emboldened Zuma and his allies in a way that set them on the path of state capture. As they consolidated power within the ANC, the looting of public resources became rampant and the dismantling of the state was intensified.
For Ramaphosa, however, 2012 opened the way for Madiba’s ‘chosen one’ to become the deputy president of the country after a seventeen-year wait. It was the return of Mandela’s ‘prodigal son’.
In her analysis of the Mangaung conference, my colleague Ranjeni Munusamy wrote that Ramaphosa would face an uphill battle from the left in the ANC tripartite alliance. ‘Cosatu and the SACP supported Zuma’s re-election but did not want him to replace Motlanthe. They felt safe with Motlanthe but distrusted Ramaphosa, believing he has traded in his worker credentials and now represents the interests of business. The business sector and investor community, on the other hand, is ecstatic and relieved by Ramaphosa’s election as ANC deputy president, and the prospect of him replacing Zuma in the near future,’ she wrote at the time.
As it turned out, the people who opposed any suggestion in 2012 that Ramaphosa would serve at the behest of big business, later used that argument as a tool to discredit