CYRIL’S PRIVATE CABINET
The president is afraid to offend his ministers, so he sidelines them
No-one expects the ANC, or any regular political party, to be without internal contestation. Contestation is the lifeblood of political parties.
Only in the EFF, where Julius Malema holds total sway, or in the IFP of the 1980s and 1990s, does one person reign supreme. Those, however, are organisations that are closer to cults than they are to political entities.
At their best, political parties are chock-full of robust debate and argument. This is the joy and pain of the political game: the butting of heads, the refinement of argument and policy, and the implementation of the highest iteration of those policy positions.
Sometimes internal differences spill out into public spats. That’s OK. That’s healthy. It would be worrying if it wasn’t so. Donkey-like unity and acquiescence is the first sign of a dying party.
What is needed from the leader of a party is management proficiency. A leader shows they are in charge by astutely managing — not shutting down — the divisions and pathologies of their party.
President Cyril Ramaphosa is failing to manage his party. The organisation is a mess of rivalries and divisions, and Ramaphosa’s inability to manage these factions is leading to a collapse of his cabinet. For every minister in his cabinet he now has a parallel entity in the president’s office. This means being a cabinet minister is ceremonial. The real work is done in the presidency.
His surprise appointment of a minister of electricity is the latest example of this management failure. Eskom has a cabinet member it reports to: public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan. Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe is trying to get his hands on Eskom and has been making all sorts of statements about it.
Because Gordhan and Mantashe are fighting over Eskom, Ramaphosa has chosen to give it to a new minister housed in the presidency. Instead of firing Mantashe or Gordhan — both key allies — he has increased his bloated cabinet by one. That is failure of management for you: it is expensive and potentially ruinous.
This is a trend. To appease his opponents in the ANC, Ramaphosa has continued to keep Lindiwe Sisulu, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma and Phumulo Masualle in his cabinet. These two full ministers and a deputy are probably the most unenergetic, uninspiring, ineffective, incompetent trio yet to pass wind on a ministerial chair. All three have told Ramaphosa he is useless and should step down. Sisulu called him a liar.
Yet he retains them. How can a serious leader believe that people who consistently undermine him in public will help him deliver on a programme? Worse, Ramaphosa’s failure to act means South Africans don’t get the service they deserve from these ministries.
Meanwhile, ANC deputy president Paul Mashatile is running a campaign aimed at delivering him into office (and I don’t mean just the deputy presidency of the country but ultimately the top job) as quickly as possible.
There is no rule or convention that a newly elected deputy president of the governing party should be rushed into the deputy presidency of the country. However, to illustrate that Mashatile has been pushing for the keys to the deputy presidency, David Mabuza pointedly told a funeral in Mpumalanga two weeks ago: “I must step down to make space for the one that was elected by conference [the ANC elective conference] because I see he has become a bit restless so I am also rushing to give him space.”
These are just three active turf wars in the ANC. There are many more subfactions and subdivisions: the resource nationalist groupings, the provincial big men protecting their corruption networks, the gross tribalists in KwaZuluNatal, and so forth.
Ramaphosa’s job is to manage these divisions. Their public spats are doing huge damage to business and consumer confidence. They have brought coherent governance to a halt. His appointments into his office of a minister of intelligence, a red tape tsar, an infrastructure tsar, numerous committees and deputy ministers show that Ramaphosa has given up on managing the divisions in his organisation and his cabinet. The announcement of an electricity minister underlines the point.
The implications are chilling.