Triggers to Cyril’s potential exit amid market, political mayhem?
Cyril Ramaphosa’s supporters tell me his position as head of the ANC would be untenable if the party scored 44% or less in the May 29 elections. Why 44% and not 46% or 42%? There isn’t enough time to listen to the details about the number, and these things are rather unscientific at the best of times. It’s best to sip on the cappuccino and prepare for the storm that is likely to unfold.
It’s also revealing that Ramaphosa’s camp sees a particular number that would trigger serious vulnerability in their guy. I know you want to hear about potential successors, but hold on for now. And don’t even consider Paul Mashatile yet. There isn’t enough time or column space to get into that issue. Ramaphosa may have enough dirt (or nudes) on Mashatile to make SA’s second citizen think of political betrayal.
I can’t make a call yet on the probability of Ramaphosa’s exit after May 29, but what is clear is we will have the question in the back of our minds every single day of his possible second term. We have reached the era of the political unknown, financial market volatility, and angst across the economy. Algorithms will drive risk metrics, creating market patterns that often ignore the political fundamentals.
Ramaphosa needs to keep a sheet of scenarios in his back pocket as he runs around looking for votes so that the decision-making metrics are accessible in the post-May 29 market storm.
I’d be surprised if the ANC gets close to 50% of the vote. My range is 45% to 48%, with a bias right now on the lower side. Also, I don’t believe a single one of the polls published in the past 12 months. They have understated the ANC’s reach due to bad design and poor methodologies. Also, the media has misreported the results, failing to emphasise critical elements including the size of the polls and field dates, the margin of error, and the non-allocation of undecided voters.
Shockingly, some of the polls were conducted by Joburg-based first-language English speakers who phoned registered voters in Mtubatuba and KwaNdengezi in KwaZulu-Natal to ask them about Jacob Zuma. I don’t have the accent to conduct an interview of that nature without the risk of triggering psychological biases in the respondents.
Even a first-language an isiZulu speaker from Joburg would speak with a Gauteng dialect that could introduce a bias of sorts in a rural voter.
The polls have been horribly unrepresentative and can’t give an accurate snapshot of the provincial mood. A 1,500 poll sample might be OK nationally but it can never accurately create a reliable picture of any underlying nuances in each of the nine provinces.
Tired of all the negativity from pollsters, the ANC has commissioned its own, due early in May. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad — the alternate poll wouldn’t create a different reality.
The ANC is incapable of generating enough momentum in the last four weeks of its campaign to raise its share of the vote above 50%. It has a limp campaign in its core provinces whose total contribution to the national picture is diluted by the party’s decline in the most populous provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.
Instead, it is planning to increase its share of votes from Mpumalanga and Limpopo. There are more maize cobs there than voters. The ANC is better off putting its resources in the populationdense, high-return areas of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal instead of travelling to far-flung places like Kimberley, where there are more goats and sheep than voters. I’m told Ramaphosa will be there on May 9. He is wasting his time.
His choice of coalition partners increasingly looks like a matter of the economy vs politics. The idea of working with the DA is growing within the ANC. Also, the financial markets are dead set against an ANC-EFF coalition. If the ANC is seriously thinking of the EFF, the markets will go nuts and a huge sell-off could sink the economy.
A marriage between the ANC and the DA would be bad in political terms, but popular in business. Wedding the racial and economic establishment with the political elites would turn the country into a populist tinderbox.
SA’s economic problems are too deep and too structural to be solved in one term; therefore it would be easy to run a populist campaign against the establishment coalitions in the 2026 local elections, a precursor to 2029.