It is time to put on your game face, Cyril

There are some arcane rules about changing MPs that make it difficult for a party to simply get rid of sitting members and to replace them with someone more agreeable. The ANC had to go through all sorts of contortions to bring Brian Molefe into Parliament.

It’s an esoteric subject, really, and arises only now because of the strange position in which Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma finds herself. We learn more about her every week.

What we already know is easy: she and President Jacob Zuma were once married. They had four children and divorced. Nelson Mandela made Nkosazana his first health minister. She is a qualified medical doctor (Bristol University, 1978). Thabo Mbeki made her foreign minister. Zuma made her home affairs minister and then took her out of South African politics and got her elected chairwoman of the AU Commission, in Addis Ababa, a job from which she has just returned.

More recently, we know she has a residence available to her at Zuma’s Nkandla homestead. She pops up at church gatherings and elsewhere to make speeches, some of which are barely reported. This week, she spoke at Wits University.

What she says is varied. We need more banks, she told one audience. Don’t believe people who say we need more renewable energy, she told another. Sandton City is not representative of SA (yes, she spotted this). The DA uses the courts to govern, she said at Wits, without saying to govern what. The ANC must be “clever” about lobbying other parties to change the Constitution so the state can expropriate land without paying for it.

We also know that Zuma wants the mother of four of his children to succeed him as president of the ANC in December. She would then become head of state in 2019 if the ANC wins that election. We know that she wants both of those things to happen.

We also know now that she did not want to be a part of Zuma’s recent cabinet reshuffle. But she is on board with Jacob on radical economic transformation, his clever programme to disguise the acceleration of the Gupta family’s state capture project. In just two years, Nkosazana could be president of the country, extending the Zuma legacy so far ahead its end sort of dematerialises.

Standing between her and this prize is one man, Cyril Ramaphosa. Seemingly buckled over, humiliated and skewered by Zuma for daring to rebel or even to look like disagreeing slightly with his treatment of former finance minister Pravin Gordhan and the nation’s economy last week, Cyril is, I’m afraid, our last hope.

We are all gutted by Cyril’s silence in the face of sheer evil, of Zuma the serpent, these past three years. We wait for him to say something big and brave.

There, last week, was a flicker of real anger. The treatment of Gordhan was “unacceptable”. We waited in vain for more and then it all collapsed. Zuma seemed to win. The demonstrations today are important but the momentum, the possibility of imminent change, of radical change, has suddenly gone. You can feel it. The ANC’s top six, Cyril included, are once again “united”.

But for Ramaphosa, it’s united or nothing. Zuma could fire him at any time, without explanation. It is (yet another) appointment in the gift of the president. In fact, with so many fired ministers resigning as MPs, there’d be no problem getting Nkosazana into Parliament and making her deputy president of the country. Just like that.

Ramaphosa’s agony is that he has to suck it up. It is too late for a “new” candidate to emerge to challenge the Zuma-Dlamini-Zuma express. If Cyril isn’t still inside the party machine come the December elective conference, it’ll simply be the coronation of a queen.

So, we should probably cut him some slack. He has to stay in the race and the most important part of that is Being There. He could, obviously, run a little harder. Make more speeches, map out a country and an economy we can all be part of. Cyril’s isiZulu and isiXhosa are not, I’m told, in great shape, but if he campaigned more in rural areas, he could turn that to his advantage. Make a joke of it. People trust him. In deepest Transkei, thousands of families will never forget the role he played in getting their migrant worker fathers and sons some protection as he established the National Union of Mineworkers in the face of apartheid opposition.

He should play to his strengths. Cosatu is backing him and even though it is not the force it once was, it has territories where it is still strong. They can get the crowds in. Time is not on the side of the Just, but the Zuma Express can still, I think, be stopped. Cyril Ramaphosa just has to start pitching up.

IN JUST TWO YEARS NKOSAZANA COULD BE PRESIDENT OF THE COUNTRY, EXTENDING THE ZUMA LEGACY SO FAR AHEAD ITS END WON’T BE SEEN