ANTHONY BUTLER: Independents could bring out the worst in politics

Personalised politics is likely to unleash a swarm of malevolent single-issue candidates

First published in BusinessLive

11 AUGUST 2022

“Independents” sound like the very best of our politicians. They might turn out to be the very worst.

This group of political hopefuls was championed by the Constitutional Court in a June 2020 ruling. Candidates for high office, the eminent judges maintained, should not be forced to join or form a political party. Instead, they insisted, the Electoral Act must be amended to allow such independents into national and provincial legislatures.

Independence is an attractive idea. It suggests freedom from external control and possession of an uncorralled mind. Surely it would unleash free agents who could transcend the muck and division of corrupt party machines?

Furthermore, independent candidates ostensibly appeal to “independent voters”, a group of citizens who believe their policy preferences are determined by their own upstanding personal moral values and their enormous cognitive capabilities.

However, personalised politics, uncontained by the discipline of party programmes, brings with it some obvious drawbacks. It would probably unleash a swarm of malevolent single-issue candidates. For instance, where there are many immigrants, xenophobia could be a route to success.

Where the boundaries of apartheid tribalism still divide citizens, independents could mobilise around fantasies of ethnic oppression. Where one racial group fears another, racial “swamping” would be the dog whistle an independent could blow.

Less widely understood is the way supposedly independent candidates could protect rather than challenge SA’s big political parties. If the drafters of the Electoral Amendment Bill have their way, independent candidates will have to assemble 12,000 signatures to get their names on the ballot paper. This achievement requires hard political organisation rather than benign intent.

Once in the race they will not get far without a campaign machinery that informs and mobilises voters. They will need researchers, communications teams, transport budgets, manifestos, documents and foot soldiers to interact with potential electors. Even independent candidates need to be represented by party agents at counting and voting stations to ensure elections are fair.

The structures and systems that allow success in elections are mostly found in existing political parties. The problems such mechanisms bring do not go away simply because they are not called parties.

Parliament has concluded that no cooling-off period is required before party members who have lost internal battles can run as independents. This will help parties solve a problem that has bedevilled them: how to manage internal factionalism and competition for positions and resources.

In the ANC, competitors for candidate or leadership positions resort to intimidation or even murder. When they lose, protest and disruption follow. In the DA, ambitious politicians denied advancement have opted for the nonviolent, but also disruptive, theatre of defection.

The creation of new splinter parties — such as the EFF or ActionSA — has provided a home for disgruntled factions of the ANC and the DA. Party processes are no longer a zero-sum game. Such formations run as distinct parties, but they remain natural coalition partners of their mother bodies.

Independents will be a fresh and equally useful instrument of party management. Losing factional leaders can run for election anyway, with the possibility of securing a legislative job. They can bring their hangers-on and organisers with them, all hopeful that their candidate may yet secure office and so access opportunities and resources through the politics of coalition government.

The activities of campaigning independents still cost money, even if the money is now circulating in “movements”, foundations and think-tanks that surround a candidate, rather than in a formal party. The consequent reliance on donors recreates the dependencies and malign influences that have discredited existing political parties.

Independents may not, in fact, be independent.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Big changes coming for offshoot of British colonialism

First published in BusinessLive

28 JULY 2022

Some South Africans will feel a pang of regret as the 22nd Commonwealth Games get under way in the English city of Birmingham. After all, it was with much excitement that then sports minister Fikile Mbalula announced in September 2015 that Durban would be the first African city to host this event.

SA’s games were due to start on the 104th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, July 18 2022, and were a stepping stone to a bid for the first Olympics on African soil.

Others will be rather pleased SA is not the host. Despite strenuous lobbying by mega-event advocates, multisport competitions remain financially ruinous to almost all who are dumb enough to pay for them. The 2010 games in Delhi, for example, were meant to cost $250m, but the final bill was by some estimates more than $10bn.

Moreover, critics familiar with Mbalula’s political style observed that the games would benefit the minister himself far more than they would assist the country. Even the feasibility studies provided him with money to splash out on KwaZulu-Natal elites who had risen in Jacob Zuma’s wake to dominate much of the ANC.

Worse still, the symbolic character of the Commonwealth is a slap in the face to most participants. SA participated in the first precursor to the games, an “Inter-Empire Championship” held in 1911 in a South London venue for bar billiards, darts and football, Crystal Palace. SA went on to be a star performer in the British Empire Games for two decades.

In 1961, at a Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference, Malaya, India and many African states pushed successfully for the expulsion of SA because of its race-segregation policies.

On the bench for three decades, the country nonetheless remained at the centre of the politics of the Commonwealth Games. Nigeria boycotted the 1978 festival in Edmonton in protest at New Zealand’s sporting relationships with SA. More than 30 countries stayed away from the 1986 games in the  campaign to change British government policy on the apartheid state.

SA returned to the games in 1994 as part of the post-apartheid cultural and sporting dividend. In the years that followed there were special triumphs, including swimmer Chad le Clos’ 17 medals, from 2010 to 2018.

Such accomplishments were inevitably overshadowed by the politics of post-apartheid competition. Sports bequeathed by colonialism, such as swimming, netball, lawn bowls, and cricket, are those for which access and resources remain most dramatically unequal. Indeed, symbolism and unequal access continue to bedevil transformation in precisely the sports that differentiate the Commonwealth from other global forums.

Beyond sport, however, the Commonwealth remains an important potential resource for SA. It is true that the body matters most to three dozen small member states that depend on it to address their special challenges concerning trade dependency, development finance and climate change. The Commonwealth helps such countries secure finance, voice and state capacity they would otherwise lack.

But the Commonwealth also includes major economic and political actors that share cultural, legal, linguistic and sporting legacies with SA, among them Malaysia, Nigeria, Kenya and the Australasian countries. Almost half of the 2,5-billion Commonwealth residents are citizens of India, one of the two new poles of the emerging international order.

The body sometimes looks like a washed-up colonial residue. But solidifying postcolonial sentiment across the Commonwealth, and a coming transition in the UK monarchy, are likely to bring a major and positive reorientation in the organisation’s leadership, direction and role. If the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA) consortium keeps losing coherence,  this may make the Commonwealth an increasingly important partner and resource for SA in international affairs.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Advocates of electoral change want to cross out the people’s choices

Scholarship provides no grounds to reconfigure SA’s executive around a directly elected president

First published in BusinessLive 14 July 2022 and Business Day 15 July 2022

Changing electoral systems is dauntingly complex. One has to admire the courage of senior judges who hand down opinions in a field about which they know next to nothing.

As the result of a 2020 Constitutional Court judgment parliament is engaged in a futile attempt to amend the Electoral Act to allow “independents” to be elected to national and provincial legislatures.

For ordinary folk who believe “independent” is an adjective rather than a noun, it seems the court was referring to sociopaths or egomaniacs too deranged even to register a political party.

A few weeks back chief justice Raymond Zondo, wearing his presidential commission of inquiry hat, recommended that “consideration be given to making necessary constitutional amendments to ensure that the president of the country is elected directly by the people”.

This second proposal may be even worse than the first. In a parliamentary system the head of the executive is indirectly elected by the National Assembly, and is therefore vulnerable to a vote of no confidence. Our president thus closely resembles the prime minister in any other parliamentary country.

On the other hand, a presidential system imposes a deliberate division of policy-making and power between two bodies, the legislature and the executive, which are elected separately.

But direct presidential election, if it is to be meaningful, requires changes to the organisation of the executive and its relationship to other branches of government. It is incompatible with the parliamentary vote of no confidence and the selection of most of the cabinet from the legislature. Presidential systems incorporate mechanisms to prevent the removal of a popularly elected president except under exceptional circumstances.

Academic studies of political systems broadly favour parliamentary executives. Influential empirical work suggests parliamentary systems are generally associated with better outcomes in economic and human development.

Presidential executives shift the focus of political activity away from the legislature, weaken political parties and fragment interest group politics. In postcolonial Africa the replacement of parliamentary government with presidentialism has all too often resulted in arbitrary and personalistic power, the revoking of term limits, deeper money politics and worse state capture.

Presidentialism also empowers populists. The rise of populism is constrained by the complexity of SA’s political system and by the need to form broad alliances within a governing party or coalition. This means individual leaders cannot easily campaign on the basis of ethnic or xenophobic appeals.

SA presidents have not lacked the necessary power to effect change. On the contrary, both Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma — and their palace elites — managed to accumulate power in an alarming way in their second terms, and both were demonstrably reluctant to cede it as their terms drew to a close. In both cases it was the governing party that dispatched them and their factions, through the implicit threat of a parliamentary vote of no confidence.

The recourse to this threat has been a strength of our parliamentary system, not a weakness.

Ordinary people have also not lacked the necessary power to effect change. The ridiculous complaint of many commentators, and perhaps of Zondo, seems to be that citizens have declined to elect the right parties — so we should change the system. In reality, should voters continue to diversify their support national coalition governments will soon bring change to the dynamics of the presidency, and to the relationship between the legislature and executive.

SA’s biggest problems — economic exclusion, the fusion of money and power and the organisation of political activity around the extraction and distribution of rents — are not challenges that will be resolved by the institutional fix of direct presidential election. The weight of meticulous scholarship provides no grounds whatsoever for SA to reconfigure its executive around a directly elected president. If only our judges would consult it.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: If the grid collapses, SA is a few meals away from chaos

First published in BusinessLive 30 June 2022

Load-shedding has wrought havoc on the economy in recent weeks. It has also left some investors and citizens nervous about the possibility of a total grid collapse.

National blackouts can be triggered by a variety of factors. Terrorists, for whom SA has mercifully not been a major target, pose one threat. Another is state-sponsored hackers and cybercriminals, who have attacked energy infrastructure in the US, Eastern Europe and India in recent years.

SA faces the more prosaic danger that random or hard to predict disturbances — caused by ageing and poorly maintained infrastructure, imbalances between demand and available capacity, human error and weather events — might trigger an electricity system crisis.

When parts of a power grid fail, demand shifts to nearby elements in the system. If these are pushed beyond their capacity they too will fail. In a largely automated process, overloaded transformers, cables and switches trip. They do so very quickly, because control signals and electrical power move at the same speed, making it impossible to isolate an outage. This results in cascading failures of a kind that have been seen in Europe, Asia and the Americas, as well as Africa, in recent years.

The implications of total grid failure are alarming. Key parts of national infrastructure, including hospitals, telecommunications systems, mines, sewage treatment plants and water pumping stations, have generator or battery backup that can sustain them through intermittent power cuts, but not for extended periods.

Transport, logistics, security, financial services and payments systems cannot continue for long with the grid down. Televisions and radios will go off, cellphones will die, sewage plants will overflow, and petrol stations will run out of fuel. Pretty soon food supply chains will freeze. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once observed that, “every society is three meals away from chaos”. The British domestic intelligence service, MI5, has estimated four.

Restoring power after a system-wide power loss is hard. A “black start” uses small generators to start larger ones, which can eventually restart main generators. Local power “islands” reconnect with others, eventually restoring a complete grid after days or weeks. Eskom’s black start contingency plans centre on pump storage stations, as well as on the Kendall and Tutuka plants.

In April Eskom CEO André de Ruyter observed that a total system failure is, in any event, “highly unlikely” and he rightly cautioned against “fearmongering and stoking of speculation”. Energy professionals note that SA’s extended experience of load-shedding has habituated key actors across the system — from the control room of the system operator to the municipal officials who flick the load-shedding switches — to working together effectively.

There are special dangers associated with a crisis situation though. Consensus is building in favour of “emergency action” designed quickly to supplement grid capacity through solar, wind and battery storage. This will require circumvention of licensing, environmental and regulatory controls, which opens up the possibility of corruption and misallocation of resources.

In addition, there is a danger that politics will disable functional parts of the energy system. Municipal politicians may rebel against load-shedding, especially when some parts of the local state — most notably in the Western Cape — have successfully insulated their residents from the worst consequences.

Moreover, while the system operator retains primary responsibility for ensuring the grid doesn’t collapse and it has so far been insulated against political interference, it is essential that desperate ministers and officials do not use a crisis as an excuse to interfere in its work.

Finally, we need reassurance that Eskom’s black start protocols are adequate. These ostensibly include routine stress testing of the utility’s capacity to shut down and then restore power. Are these protocols really being respected in this time of relentless stress on the entire electricity system and on the people working in it?

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

*Don’t forget to follow practicalreason*

ANTHONY BUTLER: Reflections on Watergate scandal 50 years on

Aspects of former US president Richard Nixon’s undoing remain instructive for political leaders to this day

First published in Business Day 17 June 2022

It isn’t the misdemeanour that gets you, or even the cover-up. It’s the cover-up of the cover-up.

Fifty years ago, an explosive episode in the history of liberal democratic politics had quiet beginnings. At its centre was US president Richard Nixon, an enigmatic political leader facing an electoral test to secure a second term in power. The national campaign headquarters of his opponents, the Democratic National Party, were located in the Watergate Building in Washington DC.

Soon after midnight on June 17 1972 Frank Wills, a 24-year old security guard in the office complex, noticed tape placed over the latches on doors that connected an underground parking garage to internal staircases. Following protocol, Wills called the police. Plainclothes officers arrived and made their way to the Democrats’ offices on the sixth floor of the building, where they discovered — and apprehended — five men. 

The “Watergate burglars” carried lock picks, a short-wave receiver, cameras and other nefarious items. Within months a grand jury would indict them for conspiracy, burglary and violation of federal wiretapping laws. Journalists at the Washington Post publicised links between the burglars and Nixon’s re-election campaign. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) found that every member of the break-in team was indirectly connected to Nixon’s campaign or to senior White House staff. A slow fuse had been lit, which would ultimately lead to the president’s destruction.

Aspects of the Watergate scandal remain instructive for political leaders half a century later. Alarmingly from their point of view, a president does not need to be the direct instigator of villainous activities for them to pose a threat to his political future. Nixon asked his chief of staff a few days after the break in: “Who was the asshole that did that?”

More promisingly for the political elite, events in the Watergate Building had no impact on Nixon’s immediate electoral fortunes. As Nixon himself told his “dirty tricks” fixer, Charles Colson: “Nothing loses an election … it’s going to be forgotten … you know, who the hell’s going to keep it alive?” Nixon indeed won re-election on November 7 1972, securing an astonishing 60% of the popular vote. Rarely before had the disconnect between the preoccupations of commentators and the immediate realities of political power been so starkly demonstrated.

Though the role of newspapers in bringing down Nixon has been widely celebrated, most media outlets were tepid, or even hostile to the investigations. Presidential spokespersons found it easy to dismiss events as “a third-rate burglary”, to claim “internal investigations” had been undertaken, and to “deny categorically” any White House involvement. Nixon feigned shock and fired compromised officials while promising to “get to the bottom” of the matter.

The president used state institutions he could influence directly, such as the Central Intelligence Agency, to frustrate the investigations of those he could not, notably the FBI. Members of Nixon’s inner team were initially willing to take the fall to protect their president. The cover-up of the early days began to unravel, but Watergate demonstrated that it can take a lot to remove a sitting president. Certain institutions in the criminal justice system and news media had to resist political pressure. The Senate had to be willing to question the head of the executive, and to set up a special investigation into events that dismantled Nixon’s defences.

Senate hearings revealed the existence of a voice-activated taping system in the oval office, and the supreme court — rebutting claims of “executive privilege” — ruled that the tapes should be released.

This documentary material helped bury Nixon’s plausible deniability strategy and confirmed that the president had tried to deflect investigations by government agencies. He was forced to resign from office on August 9 1974.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Deep in the ANC’s slo-mo matrix, Mantashe dodges bullets

He has so far managed to resist demands regarding scores of issues

First published in Business Day 3 June 2022

Philosophers sometimes enquire, typically after a drink, what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. The answer, in SA, is that we are still waiting to see.

The irresistible force in this case is a looming and multifaceted crisis that imperils the cohesion of the social order. The immovable object is the ANC, a monolith that retains an astonishing capacity to obstruct change.

That the unstoppable momentum of crisis and the unprecedented inertia of the ANC can continue to coexist seems possible only with a warping of time itself.

In the movie The Matrix, the hero Neo — a character who in many respects closely resembles mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe — can dodge bullets as a result of the slowing down of time.

In the same way, critics may demand from the minister immediate action to unblock clogged regulatory approvals, release outstanding prospecting licences, or introduce a transparent cadastre system. Mantashe knows, or at least believes, he can hold time back, or twist it to his own advantage.

Heretical former president Kgalema Motlanthe related an ancient truth to President Cyril Ramaphosa after his rise to the presidency of the ANC: it is important that meetings — and by extension everything else government does — should occur “on time”.

An impending fiscal cliff briefly focused ANC leaders on this wise advice, but Covid-time was a godsend for inertial procrastinators: the clocks seemed to stop; normal politics were put on hold; and very slow — extremely slow — policy-making once again seemed defensible.

Despite the laudable efforts of presidency teams, digital migration, structural reform of network industries, electricity co-generation, a new visa regime and many other essential initiatives seem always to be happening, but somehow never drawing to a close.

How can we explain the continuing disjuncture between crisis time and ANC time? ANC leaders are often exceptionally competent. They can combine the power of money with intimidation, they centralise and extract rents, and they plough most of what they make back into their organisational machines. They do not start out greedier than any other SA citizen.

However, the mechanisms that select them for advancement predispose them to assemble war chests — and ensure that all but a few have absolutely no idea how to address the real challenges facing their country.

The ANC’s time horizons are meanwhile muddled by the movement’s long range theory of history, or “national democratic revolution”. A dysfunctional black empowerment framework and hugely destructive and corrupt state-owned enterprises are insulated from reform because they ostensibly contribute to such historic longer term projects.

The politics of time also make possible symbolic policies that have no chance of realisation — at least before Jesus comes again. Land expropriation, fleets of nuclear power stations, the National Development Plan 2030, and even the AU’s Agenda 2063 (an SA export): all displace the impossible to an imaginable — but imaginary — tomorrow.

ANC folklore celebrates “Umrabulo”, ostensibly a practice among prisoners on Robben Island. It refers back to traditional beer drinking sessions, in which the cup is passed from hand to hand, and — more importantly — knowledge is passed, by deliberation, from person to person.

The problem, while we are deliberating, lies with time itself. The bullet does not really slow down while we act to evade it, and the crises we face do not wait for us to resolve them. Contrary to Karl Marx’s famous dictum, history does not only set human beings challenges they have the tools, and time, to resolve.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

An excerpt from Anthony Butler, Cyril Ramaphosa (3^rd edition, Auckland Park, Jacana, 2019) pp. 349-53.

Judge Dennis Davis recalls that Mac Mararaj and Ahmed Kathrada, both very close to Mandela, were confident that Mandela favoured Cyril as his successor – at least at some point. Mandela ‘knew Mbeki’s flaws and didn’t want him’.5 In the draft of his authorised biography of Mandela,

Anthony Sampson observed that ‘Mandela appeared often to favour Ramaphosa, and saw the advantage in having a non-Xhosa as his deputy’.

However, Mandela’s notes in the margin of the manuscript explain that he consulted widely among top ANC, SACP and union leaders ‘without indicating his own feelings’.6 It was likely that Ramaphosa’s relationship with Mandela had cooled. Mandela did not fully trust Cyril,7 and he may have become ‘disillusioned with Cyril’s naked ambition’.8

In the event, Mandela consulted many comrades he already knew would support Mbeki. One was Jacob Zuma, Mbeki’s ally and the man who had obstructed Cyril’s entry to the SACP, and who in turn was displaced by him from a leading role in the negotiations. Another was Thomas Nkobi, whose close friend Alfred Nzo had been humiliated by Ramaphosa in the election for secretary-general in 1991.9 Mandela also approached Walter Sisulu, who would have respected Tambo’s wishes, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere, who could not have known Ramaphosa at all, and two or three union leaders unsympathetic to him.10

Of all those consulted, only Joe Slovo is known to have supported Cyril. Vic Allen believes that history would have turned out differently if Chris Hani were still alive. ‘I have no doubt that Hani would have confronted Mandela about his preference for Mbeki and that he would have persuaded Cyril to remain as SG of the ANC and build up a strong radical base in opposition to Mbeki.’11

The most likely interpretation is that Mbeki was in fact the better prepared man, and that after initially preferring Ramaphosa Mandela ultimately favoured him for the job. James Myburgh’s partly persuasive revisionist account suggests that ‘between 1994 and 1996, not only did Mandela make various decisions which almost guaranteed Mbeki’s ascent, but he was seen, both inside and outside the party, as favouring Mbeki as his successor. He could have always chosen someone else, or at least kept the contest open. He did neither … By 1999 Mandela may have regretted not choosing Ramaphosa over Mbeki in 1994 … but the contemporaneous evidence simply does not support the assertion that he preferred Ramaphosa at the time.’12

Mbeki certainly appeared a more prudent choice. As one observer remarked, ‘Mbeki is close to Jacob Zuma and together they are seen as the moderate wing of the national executive. Ramaphosa usually has Joe Slovo at his side.’13 Moreover, while Cyril had been embroiled in the negotiations, Thabo Mbeki had moved closer to Mandela, serving humbly as his speechwriter, and building on their mutual affection for Tambo.14 Mbeki continued to bask in the respect accorded to Tambo, and acquired seniority from the relationship. Mbeki was also a hard worker, an organisational fixer and a details man, who, like Mandela, had bravely advanced the case for negotiation while others were trapped in an irrelevant militaristic paradigm.

If Mandela broadly favoured Mbeki at the decisive moment, why was there such an elaborate show of consultation? One reason is that Mandela did not want to be seen to be engineering the rise of a fellow leader from the Eastern Cape, because this might raise dangerous perceptions of ethnic or at least regional favouritism. Certainly, such considerations must have played some role in Ramaphosa’s fate, in the indirect sense that he was not part of longstanding familial networks in the Eastern Cape.

Ramaphosa, like many others, also had difficulty engaging with the ethnic chauvinists of the Zulu royal court. The problem was not the IFP leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who may have been a ‘complex and frustrating interlocutor’,15 but was not a crude ethnic nationalist. According to Penuell Maduna, there was never any effort on Buthelezi’s part to exclude ANC negotiators on ethnic grounds.16 Rather, it was King Goodwill, who had a curious conception of the place of the tribe in political life. During his negotiations with the NP, he demanded a kingdom that embraced not just Natal, but also the southern Transvaal, some of the Eastern Cape and parts of the Free State. He was not impressed by FW de Klerk’s pertinent observation that the people living in those places might not want to be his subjects. The king pronounced himself willing to tolerate rule by whites, because they had defeated the Zulu in battle, but was unwilling to be ruled by the Xhosa. Moreover – and Steward emphasised that ‘the Venda dimension was very important in these discussions’ – one of the Zulu princes proclaimed that ‘We are not prepared to be ruled by the Venda dog Ramaphosa’.17

It was inevitably Afrikaners who offered the most uncomplicated interpretations of the implications of tribalism for Cyril’s leadership ambitions. Roelf Meyer, reflecting on the matter in 1996, conceded that it was difficult for an outsider to speculate successfully. However, he observed that ‘Thabo is coming from the tribe that forms the basis and still plays a dominant role in the organisation’.18 Tertius Delport’s less nuanced 1996 judgement was that ‘It’s ethnic politics again. I think he’s a Venda, you can’t have a Venda … He’s from a minority and not well liked, not even minority but seen as an inferior little tribe, whatever. So, Ramaphosa: never, never, never.’19

As we shall see later, such outsider judgements underestimated the capacity and determination of the ANC to strive for the equitable treatment of ethnic groups. From the perspective of the organisation and its leader, it would certainly have been desirable for Mandela’s successor precisely not to be a Xhosa-speaker.

On Bantu Holomisa’s view, Ramaphosa’s expectation that he would become Mandela’s deputy was probably built up by the old man himself. If Mandela was considering Cyril, he would certainly have ‘sounded out Cyril about this in advance’, perhaps giving him the impression that the job was already his.20 Only this course of events, according to Holomisa, can account for Ramaphosa’s ‘over-reaction’ when Mandela chose Thabo Mbeki instead. Cyril was offered a consolation prize – the post of foreign minister – but he declined it.21 Indeed he stormed off that same day, in what was widely believed to be a sulk, to fish with his old friend Rick Menell. (‘He arrived late, and caught a very big fish.’)22 Nthato Motlana derided this behaviour as ‘running off to stay with some white boy in the suburbs’.23

Cyril then boycotted Mandela’s 10 May inauguration, which, in Holomisa’s view, ‘was a little childish, but one must think what made him behave in this manner … His over-reaction was perhaps understandable.’24 Ramaphosa’s now largely estranged wife, Nomazizi Mtshotshisa, attended the event with veteran journalist Allister Sparks.25 So disappointed was Cyril that some close acquaintances believed he had decided to quit politics altogether. Roelf Meyer recalled that ‘Cyril’s disappointment first originated when he was not appointed deputy president, and he wanted then already to leave … Cyril asked [Mandela] in 1994 to leave and he denied him the opportunity to go … I don’t think Cyril would have been able or been prepared to serve under Thabo.’26

Ramaphosa’s decision not to accept a cabinet post, however, may not have been motivated by a desire to step aside from active politics. A more plausible explanation is that Ramaphosa wanted to concentrate his attention on internal ANC machinations. He was rumoured to have refused Mandela’s offer of a cabinet post on the grounds that he had not had the opportunity to do justice to the office of ANC secretary-general.27

Now that his commitment to the negotiations was behind him – or so he thought – he wanted the chance to do the job properly. Mandela was willing to concede on these grounds – and it must be remembered that the old man could probably have compelled him to serve in the cabinet had he wished.

Inevitably, a whispering campaign was immediately launched, suggesting that Ramaphosa was preparing to ‘go back to the branches’ to prepare a grassroots campaign for the leadership. He was shortly to be placed number two in the ANC’s complex list process, in effect ranking

him behind only Nelson Mandela in the party’s informal hierarchy. It was still conceivable that he might secure the post of ANC deputy president at the December 1994 ANC conference, and then rise to the position of ANC president – and so successor-designate to Mandela – at the movement’s 1997 conference.28

Endnotes

Chapter 18: Triumph and disappointment

1 Kader Asmal, author’s interview, Parliament, Cape Town, 13 December 2006.

2 Cyril Ramaphosa, interview with Padraig O’Malley, 28 February 1995.

3 Bantu Holomisa, author’s interview, Parliament, Cape Town, 5 September 2006.

4 Saki Macozoma, author’s interview, Melrose Arch, Johannesburg, 21 November 2006.

5 Dennis Davis, author’s interview, Constantia, 23 November 2018.

6 Anthony Sampson, Nelson Mandela: The Authorised Biography. New York, Vintage Books, 1999, p. 485.

7 Kader Asmal, author’s interview.

8 As Clive Menell, on his deathbed, told Theuns Eloff. Author’s interview, Stellenbosch, 13 December 2006.

9 Sampson, Mandela, p. 485; Oyama Mabandla, author’s interview, Sandton, Johannesburg, 12 September 2006.

10 William Mervin Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC. Cape Town, Zebra

Press, 2005, pp. 32, 47; Oyama Mabandla, author’s interview; Mark Gevisser, ‘The Chief ’, Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 20 June 1999; James Myburgh, ‘Some notes on the idea that in 1994 Nelson Mandela preferred Ramaphosa as his successor’, available at <www.ever-fasternews.com>, accessed on 10 August 2006.

11 Vic Allen, personal communication, 6 September 2008.

12 Myburgh, ‘Some notes’.

13 Anton Harber, ‘Round one in the deputy president bout’, Mail & Guardian, 29 April 1994.

14 Kader Asmal, author’s interview.

15 Dave Steward, author’s interview, Plattekloof, Cape Town, 26 September 2006.

16 Penuell Maduna, author’s interview, Sandton, Johannesburg, 23 November 2006.

17 Dave Steward, author’s interview.

18 Roelf Meyer, interview with Padraig O’Malley, 25 November 1996.

19 Tertius Delport, interview with Padraig O’Malley, 9 May 1996.

20 Bantu Holomisa, author’s interview.

21 Kader Asmal and Bantu Holomisa, author’s interviews.

22 Rick Menell, author’s interview, Main Street, Johannesburg, 25 October 2006.

23 Nthato Motlana, author’s interview, Fourways, Johannesburg, 24 November 2006.

24 Bantu Holomisa, author’s interview.

25 Allister Sparks, telephone conversation with author, 19 April 2007.

26 Roelf Meyer, interview with Padraig O’Malley, 25 November 1996.

27 Anonymous informant close to Ramaphosa.

28 An anonymous informant close to Ramaphosa set out these versions of events.

29 Kader Asmal, author’s interview.

30 ANC, ‘Statement on necklacing’, issued by ANC Department of Information and Publicity, 27 April 1992.

31 Chris Barron, ‘Peter Mokaba: King of the young lions had a reputation for enjoying the good things, in life’, Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 16 June 2002.

32 Peter Mokaba and anonymous others, Castro Hlongwane, Caravans, Cats, Geese, Foot and Mouth and Statistics: HIV/AIDS and the Struggle for the Humanisation of the African, 2000,available at <www.chico.mweb.co.za/doc/aid.Castro.Hlongwane.doc>, accessed on 8 September 2004. The document was created on Thabo Mbeki’s computer for which reason he is often considered to be one of the probable authors.

33 ANC, Through the Eye of a Needle: Choosing the Best Cadres to Lead Transformation. Discussion document of the National Working Committee of the ANC, 2001. A member of the NEC informed me that Mokaba was the author of this document.

34 Anton Harber, ‘Feuds ’n debts shaped cabinet’, Mail & Guardian, 20 May 1994.

35 Vic Allen, personal communication with author, 20 January 2006.

36 Frans Baleni, author’s interview, Boksburg, East Rand, 25 October 2006.

37 Ibid.

38 James Motlatsi, author’s interview, Selby, Johannesburg, 31 August 2006.

39 Bantu Holomisa, author’s interview.

40 Helbron Vilakazi, author’s telephone interview, 1 September 2006.

41 Vic Allen, personal communication with author.

42 Widely known phrase; original source not identified.

43 Rams Ramashia, author’s interview, Waterfront, Cape Town, 31 October 2006. Nomazizi Mtshotshisa was eventually to become chairperson of Telkom and a prominent business woman in the new South Africa.

44 Anonymous source.

45 Gaye Davis, ‘How potential Mandela successor was edged out’, Mail & Guardian, 19 April 1996.

46 Hassan Ebrahim, Soul of a Nation: Constitution-Making in South Africa. Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1998.

47 Ibid.

48 Enver Surty, author’s interview, Parliament, 5 December 2018.

49 Kader Asmal, interview with Padraig O’Malley, 15 May 1996.

50 Cyril Ramaphosa, interview with Padraig O’Malley, 28 February 1995.

51 Roelf Meyer, interview with Padraig O’Malley, 24 March 1995.

52 Enver Surty, author’s interview, Parliament, 5 December 2018.

53 Conor O’Mahony, ‘There is no such thing as a right to dignity’, International Journal of Constitutional Law, 10: 2, 2012, pp. 551–74.

54 Anthony Butler, ‘Trousers of Zuma must be declared a Key Point’, Business Day, 25 May 2012.

55 Cyril Ramaphosa, interview with Padraig O’Malley, 26 May 1994.

56 Hassan Ebrahim, Soul of a Nation, p. 196.

57 Ibid., p. 207.

58 Kader Asmal, author’s interview.

59 Cyril Ramaphosa, interview with Padraig O’Malley, 24 May 1996.

60 FW de Klerk, The Last Trek: A New Beginning. Basingstoke, Pan Macmillan, 2000, p. 358.

61 Hassan Ebrahim, Soul of a Nation, p. 220.

62 Nelson Mandela, ‘Statement on the future of comrade Cyril Ramaphosa’, Cape Town, 13 April

1996.

63 Gaye Davis, ‘How Cyril was edged out by Thabo’, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, 19 April 1996.

64 Oyama Mabandla, author’s interview.

65 South African Press Association, ‘Holomisa has signed his own death knell in the ANC: Tshwete’. Johannesburg, SAPA, 1 August 1996.

66 Ibid.

67 Sowetan, 11 November 1996.

68 Newton Kanhema, ‘Mandela drops Mbeki bombshell’, The Star, 11 November 1996.

69 Sampson, Mandela, p. 529. Mbeki briefly made a show of considering Mangosuthu Buthelezi for this position.

70 ANC, ‘Cyril wants to transform the economy’, Mayibuye, 7: 6, July 1996.

71 Ibid.

72 Nthato Motlana, author’s interview, Fourways, Johannesburg, 24 November 2006.

73 Quoted in the Mail & Guardian, Editorial, 19 April 1996.

74 Ndoda Madalane, author’s interview, Morningside, Johannesburg, 22 November 2006.

75 Nthato Motlana, author’s interview.

76 Vic Allen, personal communication, 6 Septmber 2008.

77 Ibid.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Swarm of ageing ANC women points to Didiza to deputise

ANTHONY BUTLER

First published in BusinessLive

19 May 2022

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s first term has been punctuated by plague, riot, drought, fire and flood. It was little surprise to discover last September that enormous swarms of brown locusts had descended on the country.

After such biblical turmoil the re-election of the once theologically-inclined Ramaphosa to a second term as ANC president seems inevitable.

However, speculation is growing over who will take on the role of deputy president. David “The Cat” Mabuza, the incumbent, is as dead as a dodo. His health is ropey and the delegate pool for his old province, Mpumalanga, is shrinking and unreliable.

What are the requirements for would-be new applicants for the job? First, Ramaphosa cannot freely impose a deputy of his choice. If party chair Gwede Mantashe or treasurer-general Paul Mashatile kindly offer to be his deputy, he will probably have to say no, because they bring too few fresh delegate votes.

Second, Ramaphosa has a KwaZulu-Natal problem. Retired health minister Zweli Mkhize is likely to dominate the province in December. Although he will not secure the presidency, he might lever his support to bargain. Better — indeed essential — for Ramaphosa to fill the KwaZulu-Natal vacuum directly and pre-emptively.

Third, the prophet Isaiah famously lamented, “O My people! Their oppressors are children, and women rule over them” (Isaiah 3:12). However, since the ANC is not explicitly guided by a general principle that women should not lead, Ramaphosa will look for a credible female deputy.

The outcome of the 2017 national executive committee (NEC) elections tell us something about this particular candidate pool. The top ranked women, Reginah Mhaule and Violet Siwela, are Mabuza apparatchiks who are unlikely to return.

The once highly rated Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma enjoys appeal in KwaZulu-Natal and AU-acquired seniority, but she is already 73 years old. She could quite possibly lose the ANC the 2024 elections, even in the deputy role, and her Zuma branding is no longer alluring. Ageing scions of great ANC dynasties such as Lindiwe Sisulu and Naledi Pandor are also too advanced in years to hold out the tantalising hint of presidential succession that the position requires.

Bathabile Dlamini, Nomvula Mokonyane and Tina Joemat-Pettersson have suffered lapses of judgment that have come too much to the attention of the good ladies and gentlemen of the press. Working-class treasure Zingiswa Losi is a perfect fit for deputy secretary-general, but certainly not for the deputy presidency.

Intellectual giants such as Ayanda Dlodlo, Neva Makgetla and Gwen Ramokgopa, who populate the very bottom of the NEC list, were drafted in not to lead but respectively to read, count and keep an eye on the other two NEC intellectuals.

A trawl of the current NEC pool therefore throws up just two compelling female candidates: defence minister Thandi Modise and agriculture minister Thoko Didiza. Much has been written about the Modise, a former North West premier, formidable parliamentarian, so-so pig farmer and capable government minister.

But Modise only came in 35th in the 2017 NEC elections while the younger Didiza was elected at 21, served successfully as a minister as long ago as Mandela’s government, and made a remarkable comeback after she was kicked off the NEC at Polokwane.

Didiza nominally hails from KwaZulu-Natal, and she is helpfully a steadfast loyalist of the recently rehabilitated former Supreme Being and/or Higher Power Thabo Mbeki, and a long-standing board member of his presidential foundation.

What of the determinedly hungry plague of locusts that has spread across much of the countryside? Didiza has taken a characteristically robust attitude: ground teams and helicopter crews armed with insecticide and spray pumps have been deployed to wipe them out.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Autocracies, unlike democracies, cannot correct leaders’ errors

First published in BusinessLive

05 MAY 2022 – 15:25

Despite burgeoning international literature on the threats confronting liberal democracy it is surprisingly difficult to assess any democracy’s vulnerability to authoritarian rule.

There is rightly concern that electoral participation in SA has slumped, to the point where fewer eligible electors now vote for the ANC than stay at home. Opinion surveys, unreliable though they can be, offer further alarming insights into the citizen body’s views about democratic government.

At first glance the 2021 Afrobarometer surveys provide modest reassurance. Two thirds of respondents rejected one party or military rule. Just a quarter of South Africans believed parliament should be abolished and the president should rule alone — a suggestion former president Jacob Zuma once touted as a potential solution to the country’s troubles.

While four out of 10 respondents think democracy is preferable to any other kind of government, a fifth venture that a nondemocratic government is sometimes better. Up to 37% of respondents — perhaps despondents — reflect that “for someone like me, it doesn’t matter what kind of government we have”.

While a narrow majority agree that accountability to the people should never be sacrificed, even if slows government down, a full 45% intriguingly believe that “it is more important to have a government that can get things done, even if we have no influence over what it does”. It is perhaps here that democracy’s recent vulnerability lies. The generation of global “strongmen” leaders, in Russia, Turkey and elsewhere, trade heavily on their ostensible effectiveness. The Chinese system’s greatest attraction lies in that country’s practical accomplishments.

However, recent global events are eroding the “performance legitimacy” on which many autocrats depend. Few people doubt that Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine has been frankly disastrous for the Russian people, and for the economy on which they depend for their prosperity. Equally few, whatever their wider sympathies, fail to recognise that it is autocratic rule that has disabled the mechanisms of intelligence gathering and collective reflection that provide essential safeguards against major leadership blunders.

The invasion has also rejuvenated a flagging alliance of avowedly democratic states, which now includes a partially remilitarised Germany, a refocused EU, a relegitimised Nato, and a rapprochement — unfortunately largely on American terms — between the Anglosphere and its once faltering allies across Europe and Asia.

Of course, it is China rather than Russia’s declining kleptocracy that is the key to the emerging international order. Yet Putin’s adventurism has galvanised opposition to China’s own divide and rule strategies, and to its territorial and maritime expansionism.

Meanwhile, President Xi Jinping’s own performance legitimacy, and that of his party, have been thrown into doubt by his personal insistence on a “Zero Covid” strategy that has left more than 300-million people under lockdown.

Democracies, most notably the US, have endured a devastating death toll during the pandemic, but this has not rocked the foundations of their political systems. Moreover, the relatively open systems of knowledge creation that democracies maintain have also proved markedly superior to autocracies in generating scientific advances — not least among which have been highly effective vaccines.

Beyond government performance, we do not have to look far afield to understand the nature of what the Chinese call “the bad emperor problem”. Many citizens in SA are sharply aware that Thabo Mbeki’s pursuit of the life presidency of the ANC in 2007, and the Zuma faction’s craving for perpetual access to state resources a decade later, were averted only by the imperfect forms of democracy that exist in the ANC and the wider political system.

For all its limitations, democracy provides what may be an indispensable mechanism for averting the catastrophic errors of judgment to which autocratic leaders are prone.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Cyril Ramaphosa’s compacts damage the social fabric

Business and labour incumbents are entrenched at a huge cost to the economy

 BL PREMIUM

21 APRIL 2022 – 15:29

President Cyril Ramaphosa raised eyebrows in his state of the nation address in February when he announced that a “comprehensive social compact to grow our economy, create jobs and combat hunger” would be finalised in 100 days.

This suggests a grand agreement will be struck on or before May 21, though presidential spin doctors may push this back to the start of July by insisting only weekdays should be counted because social partners need to rest at weekends.

Ramaphosa’s commitment to a grand social compact should be taken with a pinch of salt. When the National Economic Development & Labour Council was launched in 1995 it resembled a European-style corporatist body nominally entitled to scrutinise social and economic policy proposals. It quickly became clear trade union and business inputs would be ignored.

Capital and labour are deeply fragmented in SA, and quite unable to sustain binding deals. They each exercise power directly — through the “tripartite alliance” mechanism of the ANC on the unions’ part, or through BEE co-option and party funding transactions on the side of business.

Ramaphosa knows business and labour well; he is fully aware that there is no institutional basis in this country for a sustainable and benign grand social compact. Current corporatist mechanisms are built on shaky foundations; they exclude non-unionised labour, small business and the unemployed, and they damage the welfare of the wider citizen body.

Ramaphosa likes to describe pretty much anything that has worked in the past as a social compact. In 2016 he reflected that, “by adopting a new democratic constitution nearly 20 years ago, South Africans from all walks of life entered into a social compact to build a new nation”.

Later that year he told a trade union conference in Boksburg that even the Freedom Charter was a “social compact to create a more human society that protects the most vulnerable among us”. At Davos in December 2018 he argued that “the Reconstruction & Development Plan … was a social compact, because a number of people participated in it”.

Sent by Jacob Zuma to troubled Western Cape farms in October 2014, the then deputy president called for a “farm social compact” that included a “moratorium” on farmworker evictions. Equally pragmatically, he campaigned for a restroom social compact, describing the Sanitation Appropriate for Education (SAFE) initiative to build decent school toilets as “a social compact that is greater than the sum of its parts … Let us act in solidarity with the children of this country.”

Though the president today deploys the language of social pacting primarily in the context of solving specific problems, the good works of presidential advisory councils, and summits for jobs and investment, his usage is far from harmless.

Existing social compacts in SA today have been struck over decades between big business and big labour. New “sectoral master plans” and localisation deals will continue to benefit these incumbents at huge cost to the wider economy, to non-unionised workers and to small businesses that will never grow — or even be born.

Ramaphosa has touted various valuable social compacting reforms — reduced red tape for small business, long overdue changes to labour laws, and an end to the bargaining council system — but current big “stakeholders” are being invited to veto these reforms if they choose.

Other issues Ramaphosa wants addressed in the social compact framework, such as income support for the unemployed, are matters about which an elected government should take a decision in the national interest.

The idea of social compacting unfortunately perpetuates the veto that vested interests have long enjoyed. Worse still, it encourages Ramaphosa’s personal tendency to prevaricate and avoid hard decisions.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.