Why Ramaphosa faces toughest decision of his career

When John F Kennedy was declared dead on November 22 1963 his deputy, Lyndon Johnson, instantly became US president. He had no time to prepare, literally not even a minute.

His finest biographer, Robert Caro, writes that Johnson was, until this moment, ill-suited for high office. He was a control freak and a micromanager; he was vengeful and apt to destroy those who crossed him. And yet, in the hours after he assumed office, a presidential instinct arose from his depths and he began to exude a new loftiness of character.

On the night of November 22 the greatest issue facing the world was who killed Kennedy. Were the Russians or the Cubans involved? The answer might have triggered a global war.

In tackling this question, Johnson did something he had never done before: he relinquished control.

He appointed chief justice Earl Warren to head a commission of inquiry into Kennedy’s assassination; and he chose as co-commissioners eminent people he was powerless to influence.

He wilfully let slip from his grasp the answer to the most urgent question of the moment. He would not be free to meddle or manipulate; he would have to await the verdict of a genuinely independent body.

Johnson appeared to understand, intuitively, that the legitimacy of the democratic order he now led required him genuinely, without the chance to backtrack or change his mind, to let go. He had never in his career done this before. His first decision as president went against his nature.

How have SA’s recent heads of state performed by this measure? When he became president in 1999, Thabo Mbeki also had to decide whether to relinquish control. In his case, the institutions in question were the police and the prosecuting authority. His predicament was tough. The rot at the heart of the arms deal was beginning to show. Top politicians would have to go down. The question of who would, and who would not, be prosecuted carried enormous consequences.

Would Mbeki opt for control? Or would he understand that the fate of the democracy he led required him to place his own fate in the hands of others? He went for outright control. He appointed men beholden to him — Bulelani Ngcuka and Jackie Selebi — to lead the prosecution authority and the police. And he barely bothered to conceal that he was directing them. (Ngcuka was appointed before Mbeki became president, but he was Mbeki’s personal choice).

We have been facing the consequences ever since. Would Jacob Zuma have come to office had Mbeki not destroyed the integrity of the justice system? Or, if Zuma had still become president, would he have been free to twist state institutions to serve his malign purposes? We just don’t know.

Now, Cyril Ramaphosa finds himself in Johnson’s and Mbeki’s shoes. Who to appoint as national director of public prosecutions is the toughest decision of his career. The temptation to choose somebody who will do his bidding is immense.

What if a genuinely independent prosecutor goes after David Mabuza, destroying the fragile coalition Ramaphosa has built? What if he or she goes after Ramaphosa’s corrupt allies in the Eastern Cape? And do you, dear reader, really want Ramaphosa to choose somebody who may destroy his presidency and bring a much nastier ANC leader to power?

And yet, if the new prosecutor is seen to go after Ramaphosa’s enemies and leave his allies unscathed, the consequences for SA’s democracy may just be fatal. Nobody said that being in charge was easy. But this one is really, really tough.

Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University and is a visiting professor at Yale