Master of the art of politicking

For weeks leading up to the State of the Nation address, the Red Berets threatened to disrupt the occasion.

They insisted they would demand answers from President Cyril Ramaphosa about the R500 000 donation to his campaign from the services management company, Bosasa, before his election at the ANC’S Nasrec conference in December 2017.

Right up until Thursday afternoon, the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF’S) chief whip told reporters that the party would caucus 30 minutes before the scheduled start of Ramaphosa’s speech to decide whether to disrupt it.

All the noise, however, came to naught. With a single digit representation in Parliament, the EFF had made their haranguing of former president Jacob Zuma a mainstay of parliamentary “debate” in the previous administration.

In the public eye, deploying the same blunt tactics for Zuma’s successor, or vanquisher, depending on your reading of history, seemed foolish.

Minutes into his prepared speech, and with the Red Berets increasingly vocally muttering “Bosasa”, Ramaphosa diverted from his address, telling the auspicious gathering of a chance meeting with Malema.

The president relayed a short, amusing account of how he had promised that he would sing Thuma Mina to Malema if the EFF leader became president. In fact, he would even rope official opposition leader Mmusi Maimane into the choir.

Malema leaned back into the padded leather bench, amused and grinning from ear to ear.

With that deft politicking, Ramaphosa disarmed a political opponent who is so often the master of the big show. It ought to remind Ramaphosa’s other opponents, both inside and outside the ANC, that he is as wily as he is charming.

Malema spent much of rest of Ramaphosa’s address scrolling through Twitter.