Dirty tricks show Zuma camp’s anxiety
How will the Sunday news disclosures about Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa’s affair or affairs affect the leadership race?
It’s a much more difficult question to answer than it seems at first glance. Instinctively, you would say they will affect his chances negatively, which is obviously the reason they were leaked by the Zuma camp.
The disclosures, if that’s what they are (Ramaphosa says he had one affair, which ended years ago; the Sunday Independent suggests affairs with six people) would, you might think, tend to support the campaign of President Jacob Zuma’s former wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, since it would enhance the attractiveness of the campaign of the dowdy mother figure.
At the very least, the disclosures would help Dlamini-Zuma since they might pare off some of Ramaphosa’s support to the other candidates, which would tend to boost her proportion of the vote.
The problem with this argument is that I just don’t think having an affair is a needle-moving event in the context of SA politics. The crucial constituency is not the public, who might look askance at moral lapses. The crucial constituency is the 4,000 or so ANC delegates who decide who will run SA.
Getting a sense of what members of this crucial group are thinking is just impossible, but for what it’s worth, my sense is that the stakes are far too high and the contest far too bitter for relative peccadillos to make any difference.
Political analysts who I think are generally on the mark make the point that the battle lines were drawn long ago and this is unlikely to make any difference.
Ramaphosa’s problem is not his marital infidelity; it is the same as it has always been: Marikana. Which is why the Sunday Independent published commentary asking whether Ramaphosa was fit to be president since he has “a plausible court case of mass murder lurking over him”.
The suggestion is despicable. Ramaphosa does not have a plausible court case hanging over him; he was cleared by the commission set up in part to take a view on this issue. It is not as yet illegal to encourage the police to manage potentially violent gatherings, and to suggest that Ramaphosa knew the police would go nuts is an absurd allegation imaginable only in the bizarre times in which we find ourselves. Still, it would be equally weird to suggest Marikana is not hurting Ramaphosa’s campaign.
How the next few months are going to unfold remains an enigma inside a conundrum, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they are making it up. In a sense, this is inadvertently visible from this desperate act by the Zuma camp. We don’t know exactly who was involved, but the pattern has been repeated now so many times, it is becoming predictable.
People close to the president leak information — often years old — about their opponents through their playthings in the press and include allegations that are essentially false but with just enough truth that they cannot be dismissed out of hand. The fingerprint of this methodology comes straight out of Soviet intelligence practices, which is partly why it is such an obvious trademark of the Zuma group.
But why, if it is true that most members of the ANC have actually made up their minds, do they continue doing it? My theory on that question is one word: desperation. One of the rumours flying around Parliament is that during the no-confidence debate, doctors had to be called to attend to the president, whose blood pressure was at dangerous levels.
But it is more than just that. South Africans are now well aware of the high levels of corruption, particularly in state-owned enterprises involving the Gupta clan. But, in fact, the problem is much larger. The dependency network built up during the Zuma presidency is massive and this group is fanatically worried that the associated largesse will disappear once Zuma goes.
Former finance minister Pravin Gordhan used to have a simple illustration of this problem: the government pays about R10 for every 500ml bottle of water it buys, yet you can get bottled, branded water at Makro for R4.50. In every corner, suppliers are ripping off the government (read “us”), and none of them wants that to end. There is a second reason the battle is continuing, which we could call the partial information syndrome.
Previous ANC conferences were essentially decided by provinces, which delivered their votes according to a slate. Yet this time, things are different. ANC secretarygeneral Gwede Mantashe has already indicated that voting will take place by means of branch-level mandates. Even nominations will take place at branch level.
In a sense, he is forced to make this declaration because almost every province is now hopelessly divided.
The premier league provinces will obviously work against this ruling, but the consequence of provincial slates is now too dangerous to the organisation, which Mantashe sensibly recognises.
The result is that unlike previous conferences, where everyone had a pretty good idea beforehand who was going to win, no one knows exactly what everybody else is thinking. The result is that dirty tricks will continue until the vote is done — assuming it will ever be.
MY SENSE IS THAT THE STAKES ARE FAR TOO HIGH AND THE CONTEST FAR TOO BITTER FOR RELATIVE PECCADILLOS TO MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE