Ramaphosa is SA’s best hope, but is he Zuma’s?

WE need to talk about Cyril. By any measure he would be the best possible successor when President Jacob Zuma leaves office after the 2019 elections. And yet the dark tradition of the ANC is that you never openly say what you want. Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa was thus reduced, this week in Japan, to insisting that he had no greater ambition than to sweep the floors of parliament.

He is not far off that now. Whenever a dirty job comes up, Cyril gets it — defending the president in parliament, fixing Lesotho, fixing the Sudan, fixing the visa mess, expelling Malema, leading “study tours” to Chinese state-owned companies, for goodness’ sake.

He must be exhausted, yet there he was again on Thursday next to the president, helping soothe the ruffled feathers of the judiciary.

Ramaphosa is a deeply intelligent and worldly billionaire. He understands our rich and our poor. He wants to be president, but when you look at how he appears to be treated by his boss and the wider ANC, you wonder how he is ever going to get the job.

When he first went back into politics, the word was that the party had instructed him to return and that he had no choice. Someone had a dossier on him.

As an explanation, that worked for a while, but it doesn’t now. If there were a dossier it would surely be used to stop him getting the top job. So why get him back into politics in the first place? To make Zuma look better? Perhaps as a test? If Ramaphosa puts his head down and does what he’s told, he then qualifies as a trusted cadre rather than a glamorous maverick?

It is going to be a tough few years. Zuma is famously disloyal to friends and allies and who knows which way he’ll turn for a successor, assuming he still has the power to influence this. Right now, he does. People say he wants his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to get his job.

They have kids and she wouldn’t send their dad to jail if the Shaik fraud charges ever came to life again.

But he might equally have such a deal with Cyril. Perhaps Ramaphosa, after all the hard work, gets one term and Nkosazana the next two. That’s 15 worry-free years after 2019! Zuma would be almost 90. The thing is, Cyril likes and admires Zuma and I suspect he’d happily protect him.

But Zuma could quickly find himself deserted if he favours Cyril too early. Provincial party bosses in the Free State, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal have grown fat on Zuma’s patronage. As have cronies such as the Gupta family.

Would they regard Cyril as reliable? Also, he has almost no natural, or ethnic, constituency. A reporter I asked to follow Cyril around KwaZulu-Natal after the Mangaung party conference said his Zulu was flaky. Gwede Mantashe might be able to help, but only if Zuma is weak. If Cyril is going to become president of the country, Zuma will have to engineer it.

He also seems accident prone. Bidding R20-million for a buffalo bull was actually good business. It is probably worth much more now, but it just looked so bad. In the run-up to Marikana, calling for action from the police when he did was common sense. Whether what he wanted was rapid, effective, concomitant or convincing action, it is absurd to argue he was soliciting murder. And he would have had no idea the plane that flew him to Japan this past week, hired by the air force through ExecuJet at Lanseria, belonged to the Guptas. He needs to hire a clever and alert full-time political adviser.

But here’s the important bit. Cyril, more than any other possible successor to Zuma, has a real understanding of the scale of the effort it will take to get our economy growing again. He knows he cannot simply impose a free market on the country, but he will know what it will take to get the private sector investing again, how to get orders back into the factories.

For the moment we have to live with his reality. Once a businessman, he is — for now — lost to business. He cannot be himself. I know people are beginning to lose faith in him, but he is trapped in a great and relentless struggle which, should he lose, will make us all poorer. He is our great hope.