Ramaphosa may have won the leadership battle but he’s lost the ideological one

With the country basking in Cyril Ramaphosa’s muchvaunted new dawn and Jacob Zuma’s reign slowly receding from memory, one important aspect of our politics seems to have been forgotten: Ramaphosa may have won the mantle of leadership, but he’s actually lost the battle of ideas within his party.

It is the radical economic transformation narrative that won the day at Nasrec. Bell Pottinger may have been hounded out of existence, but it seems to be having the last laugh after all. Its racialised message of radical transformation and so-called white monopoly capital, crafted to disguise the looting by the Guptas, has endured and seems to be part of the paraphernalia of the ANC’s reigning ideology.

This new stance has drawn the ruling party closer to its problem child, the EFF. The new romance culminated in last week’s parliamentary vote to seize private land without compensating the owner or occupant. It was a stunning victory for EFF leader Julius Malema, with his take-no-prisoners type of politics.

Leaders are often elected on the basis of their policy platforms. This doesn’t seem to have been the case with Ramaphosa. The delegates embraced him, but not his message. Instead, it was the policies of his vanquished rival that found favour.

In November last year, a month before the elective conference, Ramaphosa made what seemed to be an important speech at Orlando East, in Soweto. He called it a new deal for South Africa. It was the standard fare — good governance, fighting corruption, and collaboration between government, labour and business to end poverty and unemployment. It seemed a good platform to run on. But after it was shot down by some in the party, Ramaphosa seemed unwilling to drive his message home. As a result, the new deal, especially its language of prudence and moderation, didn’t gain traction.

At the conference, the party lurched decidedly to the left, determined to recover the territory now occupied by the EFF. One of the conference resolutions, for instance, was to vote for the seizure of land without payment, a policy the ANC had roundly rejected less than a year ago, thus embracing a position long championed by the EFF. If you can’t beat them, you join them, it seems.

Ramaphosa came out of the conference wearing the mantle of leadership but burdened by a divided top six, a national executive committee crawling with his political enemies — and a historic vote on land that he clearly doesn’t subscribe to. He has sought to ameliorate the damage by emphasising that land seizure will happen in such a way that it does not jeopardise economic growth or food production. But it’s too late. The horse has bolted.

In his response to the state of the nation address, Malema was very brief. He didn’t use all his allotted time. He didn’t need to. He had one objective in mind: to either bait, taunt or stiffen Ramaphosa’s backbone on the issue of land seizure. He knew Ramaphosa’s heart was not exactly in it. Don’t bluff us, he told him. It seems to have worked. Like sheep, the ANC followed the EFF in voting for the resolution.

But Malema’s idea is not to return land to black people. It is to take land from everybody, including black people, and give it to the government. In a word, nationalisation. That, I suppose, is progress.

The ANC’s policy confusion can be traced back to Bell Pottinger’s entry into South Africa’s political powder keg with its campaign of disinformation on behalf of the Guptas, who wanted to sidetrack public attention from their looting. The thrust of its message was that state capture was either a lie or small beer compared to the so-called white monopoly capital which had supposedly captured the entire economy. People like Ramaphosa and Pravin Gordhan, seen as a threat to the looting, were dismissed as mere running dogs of white monopoly capital. Radical economic transformation was the panacea that would rid the country of this economic apartheid. It took foreigners to reracialise the South African discourse in a very big way.

Although Bell Pottinger choked on its vomit and eventually perished, its incendiary message didn’t die with it. The rhetoric of radical economic transformation became the mantra of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s campaign for the ANC presidency. It wasn’t clear whether she understood what she was mouthing, but she had a powerful supporter in president Jacob Zuma who used the power of his office to amplify her message.

Early last year the ANC in Parliament voted against an EFF motion to expropriate without compensation, but almost days later Zuma started campaigning for exactly the same thing. The call was taken up by many branches of the ruling party, especially those supporting Dlamini-Zuma.

To make matters worse, Zuma made a surprise announcement on fee-free tertiary education on the eve of the conference. Not budgeted for and without even a discussion with the National Treasury, it was a desperate attempt to sway votes on behalf of Dlamini-Zuma. In the end, these tactics failed. Dlamini-Zuma lost. But her message is now the party’s platform.

Ramaphosa leads a party that’s pulling in a different direction from where he wants to go. As one activist puts it, the head is cut off from the body. A bit extreme perhaps, but it will be interesting to see how Ramaphosa goes about stitching the two together.