Ramaphosa reveals his thoughts in 1994
He was integral in the formation of the constitution, writes Kaizer Nyatsumba
CYRIL Ramaphosa chooses his words carefully – very carefully. Certainly, he is genial and relaxed, but he is too good a politician to allow himself to get carried away in his pronouncements.
And so, like a skilled artist trying hard not to give away too much, he culls his words most adroitly while also managing to remain warm and engaging.
The place is his ninth-floor office at ANC headquarters (at Shell House) in Joburg. The time is shortly after 8am. He looks like he has not had much sleep, and is dressed informally.
For hours on end during the day and well into the night, he worked on the report he will deliver at the ANC’s 49th national congress in Bloemfontein, this weekend.
Now, Ramaphosa has been the subject of intense speculation of late. The questions have been the same: Has Ramaphosa finally accepted defeat and decided against contesting the ANC deputy presidency to be vacated by Walter Sisulu and most likely to be filled by Thabo Mbeki?
Will he, in light of reports that he was seriously thinking of not standing for re-election as secretary-general, make himself available?
And, after his meteoric rise to the top, are knives out for Ramaphosa? If Ramaphosa is worried about all these things, he does not show it.
Admittedly, there is, during the course of the interview, the odd moment when he does not sound too confident of his future, such as when he repeatedly states that it is the delegates at the Bloemfontein congress who will decide his position.
And so, will the man who is widely acknowledged – even by his detractors – to have led the ANC negotiating team at the World Trade Centre with distinction stand, at the very least, for re-election to his present job?
Ramaphosa is non-committal. He talks about ongoing internal ANC discussions, expected to be settled at the congress, about whether or not the position of secretary-general should be filled full time.
Neither will the 43-year-old chairman of the Constitutional Assembly (CA) say why he will not be contesting the deputy presidency, a position for which he and Mbeki have always been accepted as the only candidates.
“If I run for any position, it will be the position of the secretary-general. In the end, obviously, whether I run or not will be decided by the conference.
“We need to see how best all of us can make a contribution to the ANC, and I think the contribution that I can make will be in the position that I am in now”, he says.
The record will show, however, that until president Mandela announced that he had chosen Mbeki as South Africa’s first deputy president, Ramaphosa was a major contender for the job.
It will show further that Ramaphosa subsequently declined a cabinet position as Foreign Affairs Minister, choosing instead – or so he said and still says – to remain outside of government to concentrate on rebuilding the ANC.
The record will show even further that it was not until Mandela gave him a talking to, that Ramaphosa finally changed his mind and decided to make himself available for re-election as sec- retary-general, a position he is tipped to retain.
But it was not long into Parliament’s first sitting that Ramaphosa accepted an appointment as chairperson of the CA, the body charged with the responsibility of writing South Africa’s final constitution.
The man who had wanted to devote his energies to rebuilding the ANC ended up spending a lot of time on his work as CA chairperson.
In the process, the ANC suffered. It is common cause in political circles that the ANC’s structures at branch, regional and national levels are now a shadow of their former selves.
The former National Union of Mineworkers secretary-general will be the first to concede that he has not spent as much time as he would have liked on ANC work.
But the fact is that most of the ANC’s bright leaders were swallowed by the government at the national and provincial level, as well as into the civil service.
It is this, more than Ramaphosa’s alleged tardiness, that crippled the ANC after the April election.
In his defence, Ramaphosa points out, quite rightly, that he has had to do other things in the ANC apart from being secretary-general, such as leading the ANC delegation in multi-party talks at the World Trade Centre.
“The criticism (against me), I would say, is valid. At the same time, without being defensive, one has to look at the workload.
“This actually applies to quite a number of people in the organisation. I mean people like Thabo (Mbeki) – he had to be head of international affairs, he had to be national chairperson and had many other tasks.
“At this conference, obviously, we will want to analyse all that. We will be raising the question of overloading a few people with too much work”, he says.
This notwithstanding, he believes the ANC in the government has “done very well, and with people who did not have experience in government”.
The major challenges facing the organisation at the congress are “evolv- ing a clear strategy and settling tactics around that strategy, what the ANC needs to do itself as an organisation, and how we prosecute the next phase of struggle”.
Complaints from delegates about a perceived government bias in favour of the white business communities at the expense of blacks, he acknowledges, will feature prominently.
So how would he, Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa, like to be remembered?
First there is a pregnant pause, which soon gives way to a wide grin of his face.
“Well,” he says, “it’s a difficult one because one is only remembered when one is dead and gone, and I am not yet.
“But maybe as a person who made a small contribution to bringing us where we are, and who got a great deal of satisfaction in seeing us moving from the apartheid matrix into a democratic dispensation.”
This article was first published in The Star on December 15, 1994.
Nyatsumba is The Star’s former political editor, and is the author of several books. He is currently chief executive officer of the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of Southern Africa.