SOUTH AFRICA’S FUTURE
Why Cyril Ramaphosa needs a big win in next week’s election.
In modern African history, nothing can match the luminous moment 25 years ago when apartheid South Africa’s white minority rule collapsed, and Nelson Mandela was elected as the country’s first Black president.
But Wednesday’s crucial election in South Africa may help determine whether that moment has been fatally squandered.
Cyril Ramaphosa, who was once regarded by Mandela as his inevitable heir, is running to continue as president, an office he has held since last year when his corrupt predecessor, Jacob Zuma, resigned.
He is leader of the increasingly unpopular African National Congress, which is expected to win another majority but with less than the 62 per cent support it received in the 2014 presidential election.
The challenge for Ramaphosa will be to keep his divided party and polarized country together — and that may only be possible if his margin of victory on Wednesday is high.
If, instead, voters punish the ANC at the polls for its years of corruption since Mandela left office in 1999, that will damage Ramaphosa.
The fact is, for most South Africans the road since the end of apartheid in 1994 has been a rocky one.
Even though Mandela’s historic legacy will be forever cherished, his five years as president barely began the tortuous work of healing the wounds of racial inequality. But at least Mandela was honest. His successors, until Ramaphosa, have not been.
Instead, their corruption and incompetence — with the complicity of many ANC leaders — have been breathtaking, and this has sabotaged efforts to create a new South Africa that would win the trust and support of all of its people.
In spite of that, the country is still a better place for most of its citizens than in 1994. Its constitution protects the rights of all, regardless of race, and by most measures there is less poverty and more opportunity for its people, however uneven this progress has been.
But much of that progress was achieved before 2009 when Zuma began his disastrous nine-year tenure. South Africa has been going downhill since then.
Before being forced to resign — Zuma now faces 700 counts of corruption — he and his cronies ransacked stateowned enterprises, plundered local governments and worked mightily to undermine the rule of law.
In 2018, desperately needing to replace Zuma, the battered ANC turned to Ramaphosa, a charismatic former labour and business leader. He was once thought to be the heir to Mandela but fell victim to ANC factional fights after Mandela became president. When I was part of the CBC team covering South Africa during the 1980s when Mandela was still in jail, I remember Ramaphosa as the fiery leader of the powerful mineworkers’ union who was regarded then as a lethal threat to the apartheid regime.
Since becoming president a year ago, he has initiated aggressive reforms within the ANC and the government. As a result, he faces considerable opposition from hardline factions still favouring Zuma.
The margin of his victory on Wednesday may well determine whether Ramaphosa will have enough political power to succeed.
Even during the darkest days of apartheid, it was incredible to many foreign visitors — and I include myself — how hopeful and determined Black South Africans always seemed to be in the face of horrific suffering.
Mandela evoked that spirit in his 1995 autobiography:
“There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.”
Twenty-five years after the end of apartheid and with another historic moment about to happen, South Africa’s walk to freedom is still not easy, and still not over.
Before being forced to resign, Zuma and his cronies ransacked state-owned enterprises, plundered local governments and worked mightily to undermine the rule of law