Behind the mask
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s appearance at the Zondo commission this week was historic, but he still left South Africans with many questions about his leadership of the ruling party,
The story goes that some time after his election as ANC deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa had to play host to a West African politician who was among many world leaders who were in SA for an important ceremony.
The politician, coming from a country where a bruising leadership battle was raging between the head of state and his vice-president, marvelled at how well the ANC handled its own leadership succession. He remarked on the smooth transition from Nelson Mandela to his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, and how, in turn, Mbeki was succeeded by his deputy, Jacob Zuma.
Ramaphosa did not disabuse the West African politician of his misplaced admiration; instead he waxed lyrical about the valuable lessons the current crop of ANC leaders had learnt from Mandela and his Robben Island cohorts.
No mention was made of the political blood-letting that preceded Zuma’s ascendency to power and Mbeki’s unceremonious departure from office.
Nor was there mention of the political intrigue and back-stabbing that were the hallmark of the run-up to the
ANC Mangaung conference in 2012, which ultimately saw Zuma survive a leadership challenge by his then deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe.
Instead, Ramaphosa focused on the positives, leaving the West African leader with a rosy picture of the troubled former liberation movement.
This tale is sometimes told to demonstrate Ramaphosa’s skilfulness as a politician, his ability to make people see the glass as half full rather than half empty.
During his two-day appearance before the state capture commission this week, there were moments when he seemed to be trying to do the same — paint the whole experience of sitting in front of deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo to account for ANC corruption as merely part of the process of the ruling party renewing itself.
To stress his point, Ramaphosa resorted to an old legend.
“It is almost akin to this legend of an eagle, an eagle that has reached its old age and finds out that it can no longer catch its prey and feed itself,” Ramaphosa told Zondo.
“The legend says when that time comes, it withdraws and goes to the highest peaks of the mountains and while there it goes through a very painful process of shedding its claws, of plucking out its feathers, and they argue that it bleeds, it goes through pains and suffering.
“But after it has plucked out its feathers, taken out its claws, they grow back and it emerges with new feathers and claws and it then starts to fly off and it soars and goes even higher and functions a lot better.
“So this commission is a cathartic moment for the ANC, I must say …
“Our presence here is that process of [removing] our claws and pulling out our feathers so that we may come out of this process new. We have got to go through this process and, beyond your report, we should be able to renew
So this commission is a cathartic moment for the ANC … we should be able to renew ourselves
ourselves and deal with the matters that brought us here.”
He went to great lengths trying to persuade Zondo and the evidence leaders that not only was the ANC sorry for its role as an enabler of state capture but that, under his watch, the party had begun to turn the corner.
Shining a light in dark corners
“We have gone through a period of introspection, and in part the reason we decided we are going to advocate for the establishment of this commission, while there was even talk that this commission could tear the ANC apart, we were brave enough and courageous enough to say this is a process we must go through as part of our own renewal process,” he said.
Ramaphosa came to the hearings accompanied by party heavyweights in the form of its national chair Gwede Mantashe, deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte and treasurer-general Paul Mashatile.
This on its own was meant to be a powerful statement of the ANC’s commitment to assisting the commission with its investigation, an important act given that some within the party’s ranks seem determined to discredit Zondo and collapse the work of the commission.
But while Ramaphosa deserves all the praise he is getting for his unprecedented decision, as a sitting head of state, to subject himself to the commission’s processes, his performance over the two days would have left many wondering about how far the ANC is really willing to go to ensure that the political circumstances that made it possible for Zuma and his Gupta friends to implement their state capture project never arise again.
Sunny with patches of vagueness
While acknowledging the party’s role and apologising for it, Ramaphosa seemed unable to spell out clearly why, in his view, things went wrong.
He was also not convincing when it came to what action he, as party leader, believes should be taken to ensure state capture does not happen again. Instead, his answers seemed to suggest that he would prefer to outsource that leadership role to Zondo and his commission.
Judging by his line of questioning, it seems the deputy chief justice was also not persuaded that since the 2017 Nasrec conference, which Ramaphosa described as a watershed, the party had done enough to put an end to corruption and state capture.
“This is the majority party, the government is its government, it has a very important role to play in where the country is going,” the judge said.
“And if one looks at the types of issues that the commission is investigating, one can see that whatever it is the ANC may say we did, simply didn’t work.
“That is why corruption has reached the levels it has reached, that is why we hear the kind of evidence the commission has been hearing,” he said.
Zondo went on to say he believed the ANC “can’t make a meaningful impact on issues of corruption and state capture unless it confronts issues that are painful to confront”.
He asked Ramaphosa to reflect on this and to give the commission a comprehensive reply when he returns later this month to address it in his capacity as head of state.
Very few doubt that Ramaphosa’s victory at Nasrec marked a turning point in the fight against state capture.
A different outcome, especially judging by Zuma’s current hostility towards the whole process, could have meant that Zondo and his team would be finding it even harder to do their work than they are now.
No explanation for years of silence
But it is important to scrutinise Ramaphosa’s role, both in the party and government, in the years leading up to 2017.
His main argument, one that is supported by Mantashe and other ANC leaders who have now turned against Zuma, is that before the Gupta e-mails became public, there was not enough compelling evidence of state capture.
This is despite numerous media reports in this regard as well as remarks by Fikile Mbalula, a member of the ANC national executive committee and the cabinet, who told an NEC meeting in 2011 that the Guptas had known about his appointment as minister of sport the previous year, before Zuma told him about it and before it was announced.
But what does Ramaphosa say to the charge that he kept quiet and chose to look the other way, especially after being elected deputy president in 2012, because his focus was on the main prize — the presidency — and he did not want to jeopardise his chances by speaking out?
If that was the case for him, a senior ANC leader and a wealthy business person who did not really depend on a government job for survival, what of ordinary ANC MPs and cabinet ministers who were fearful of losing posts they held at Zuma’s pleasure?
What happens in future if the ANC has another Zuma-like leader as its president?
While it is understandable that, as leader of the party, Ramaphosa has to defend the ANC’s policy on issues such as cadre deployment and voting in parliament strictly according to the party line, he missed an opportunity to share his views of how these policies can be modified to prevent their manipulation by unscrupulous leaders.
He left all of that to the commission.
It may well be that his approach at the commission was tempered by two considerations: there are local government elections later this year, which means he needed to be careful that his testimony was not too damaging to the party’s image; and the ANC holds its national conference next year.
If Ramaphosa wants to win a second term at the head of the party, he needed to come across at the commission as a “party man” and not be seen as disowning some of the ANC’s beliefs and practices, no matter how harmful they may be to the country.
But even if these considerations dominated his thinking as he took the witness stand, surely he would have known that the vast majority of voters put him in office primarily because he had promised to carry out the difficult job of cleaning out both his party and the government of corruption.
His answers this week were not always convincing that he has a clear plan to do so. He’ll have to try harder when he returns at the end of this month.