Tag: nelson-mandela

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The limits of political biography

ANTHONY BUTLER: Biographies leave much unsaid over presidential power

Complex interplay of factors that shape a president’s actions are mostly overlooked

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

 28 March 2025

Political biographers — I am a part-time member of this tribe because I once wrote a biography of Cyril Ramaphosa — run into a problem when their subject actually becomes state president.

This predicament is frustrating because the celebrity’s prospective or actual rise to the top job is often the reason the biography was written in the first place. 

Biographies understandably elaborate on personality and formative experiences rather than the actual mechanisms of power in the presidential office. A focus on personal life narratives, influenced by biographical traditions and outmoded Freudian psychology, overlooks the complex interplay of factors that shape a president’s actions. 

In contrast to regular party politicians, presidents occupy a unique position at the pinnacle of state power, navigating complex tensions as head of state and government, party leader and state manager, international representative and domestic politician, and disburser of formal and informal power (and money).

Add to this a labyrinth of classified documents that lie mouldering in databases or the basements of government departments, and inaccessible private interactions with powerful individuals at home and abroad, and it is little wonder few political biographies do more than scratch the surface of presidential power. All we get is the illusion that we have been transported into the mind of the leader as he sat behind the presidential desk and pondered the great decisions of state. 

This challenge is extreme regarding Nelson Mandela. We have now been told an extraordinary range of things that we really do not want to know — about his wives and relationships, Communist Party dalliances, intermittent Methodism and the way he polished his shoes. But little is known about how he actually operated as state president. For that we have to rely on thinly detailed chapters in biographies, and an extremely generous book from Mandla Langa assembled from notes and speeches Mandela left behind. 

This is of some practical importance. As Roger Southall notes in his thought-provoking study Smuts and Mandela, many younger South Africans believe Mandela “sold out” to white monopoly capital, and that “his democracy has proved to be a sham”, in which “the black majority is little better off than it was under apartheid”. 

The instinct of many scholars has been to rally round Mandela, explain the context in which his decisions were taken, and justify the compromises that had to be struck at that time. This defensive approach is a mistake. 

Mandela “improvised a nation”, as one academic brilliantly observed, through simple yet powerful gestures that reached beyond political elites to ordinary people. His primary goal as president was to avoid debilitating racial war and promote racial reconciliation — a commendably coherent and clear objective, but one that may have been entirely misconceived. 

Though Mandela was extraordinarily effective in terms of symbolic leadership, he lacked engagement with the practicalities of governing. He also failed to confront the HIV/Aids crisis effectively — on Langa’s account because of his concern about the electoral costs of speaking out — and instead exercised leadership where it was not needed, for example backing school feeding schemes to which nobody was opposed. 

In resolving the ANC’s funding crisis he tolerated the arms deal, perhaps because of the nominal party funding element it involved, solicited foreign donations from authoritarian countries, and accepted personal favours for himself and his family. In these ways Mandela laid some of the groundwork for the problematic relationship between money, politics and personal gain that became more pronounced under his successors. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town. His new book, ‘Presidential Power’ will be published later this year. Readers who may have personal photographs that reveal the character of any SA president can contact him on anthony.butler@uct.ac.za to discuss their possible inclusion in the book. 

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Scrambled eggs with Zuma

ANTHONY BUTLER: Mathews Phosa’s memoir contrasts innocent’s optimism with reality

First published in Business Day

29 November 2024

Mathews Phosa. Picture: WYNAND VAN DER MERWE

Mathews Phosa. Picture: WYNAND VAN DER MERWE

Devotees of Mathews Phosa have described him as the best president SA never had — though the same sentiment was once expressed about Cyril Ramaphosa, so perhaps we should not read too much into it.

Phosa recently launched a memoir, Witness to Power, the title of which suggests an observer of, rather than a participant in, ANC governance. The compelling central narrative of the book concerns the trials that shaped the protagonist’s character and brought about his moral enlightenment.

The Hollywood movie Forrest Gump follows the transition of a simple-minded rural child into a complex, empathetic adult. This book likewise contrasts an innocent’s unwavering optimism and childlike wonder with the harsh realities of the world he encounters. Like the film, the book incorporates some selected aspects of actual historical events. 

It is also a tragicomedy in which Phosa makes the reader laugh and cry, albeit sometimes unintentionally. Things just kept happening to Phosa. The exiled ANC leadership wanted him to run a legal practice in Zimbabwe, but he wanted to fight the enemy. So Oliver Tambo sent him for military training in East Germany and soon he was a military commander. 

He chatted to a newly freed Nelson Mandela, and was told he would be a key transition negotiator. Then, in 1994, Mandela made him premier of Mpumalanga. The next surprise came, out of the blue, when pesky ANC branches in 1997 nominated him for the deputy presidency. Mandela called him up and told him to withdraw — it was Jacob Zuma’s turn.

Phosa stayed on as Mpumalanga premier, where his trials and tribulations just got worse. He was shocked. “I never for a moment thought that anyone in my administration would see their position as an opportunity for self-enrichment.” 

Thabo Mbeki became jealous of Phosa’s friendship with Mandela and used a trumped-up inquiry to vilify him. Here narrative and reality intersect: “I lost my job for resisting those implicated in corruption and criminality.”

Phosa learnt moral lessons of course, notably that “your friend today could be your enemy tomorrow” and that “some leaders attempt to criminalise and discredit their opponents”.

Of course, sympathisers of the Higher Power will counter that Mbeki may have been paranoid, but Phosa, Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale really were trying to bury him.

Events interceded again in 2007, when Phosa was press-ganged by Zweli Mkhize and then Gwede Mantashe to run on Zuma’s Polokwane slate, as secretary-general or treasurer: “They insisted I had to do something. So I agreed to be treasurer.” 

Phosa helped legitimise a slate topped by a crooked president, but wanted to do good, trying to dissolve the ANC-Chancellor House link that had helped destroy Eskom, and pushing unsuccessfully for party funding reform.

He also saw exactly what the Guptas were up to and kept clear of personal enrichment. Prudently, he “decided not to burden my fellow members of the top six with the details”. 

Every treasurer-general loves a despot doling out petrodollars, and Phosa admits he “played a role” in securing Libyan donations in 2009. But he is mostly concerned to distance himself from billions that allegedly left Libya for SA at the behest of the brother leader and guide of the revolution. This suggests that more may soon come to light. 

Phosa’s best advice about taking breakfast with Zuma? Worried about poisoning, he observes that, “when he dished himself scrambled eggs, we did the same”. 

There are also many lessons for the rest of us from this exceptional man who tried to combine doing good with political survival. Echoing Mandela, he insists that bitterness is “a poison that we cannot afford”.

Perhaps most intriguingly for members of his own party, Phosa asserts that the “cancer of tribalism” once again “threatens to tear the ANC apart”.

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

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The ANC and the churches

ANTHONY BUTLER: The ANC has the edge in changing spiritual landscape

African independent churches, evangelical bodies and ‘prosperity churches’ are now centre of faith

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

05 APRIL 2024

The Easter weekend offered a useful reminder that SA society is changing in ways that might leave some of our political parties behind. 

This remains a predominantly Christian society. The 2022 census suggested that a full 85% of South Africans consider themselves Christian, with fewer than one in 10 describing their beliefs as “traditional African”. No other religion reaches even 2%. 

Of course, Christianity played a major role in both white Afrikaner politics and the formation and evolution of the ANC. The Dutch Reformed Church was famously described as the National Party at prayer.

The ANC’s founders were primarily converts to the optimistic Protestant faiths taught in mission schools. Anglicanism and Methodism encouraged temperance, and the celebration of commerce and good works, as an avenue for civilisation.

Local variants of liberation theology that emerged in the late 1960s helped shape the black consciousness ideology that mobilised the youth in the 1970s — including our president, Cyril Ramaphosa. In the 1980s and early 1990s many churches played a central role in the United Democratic Front — though of course many did not. 

After 1994, under the leadership of the secret Methodist Nelson Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, the ANC tried to remake SA as a modern and secular country. However, such leaders and their churches were becoming increasingly unrepresentative of Christianity in the wider society.

Today about 5% of Christians are Methodists, and a similar number are Anglicans or Reformed Church members. They are dwarfed by enormous African independent churches and fast-growing Pentecostal and evangelical bodies. 

For independent churches, political affairs are a distraction from the demands of spiritual health. Change comes about not by means of good works but with the return of the Kingdom of God, after the existing social order has been destroyed by Armageddon. 

Many fast-expanding churches are “prosperity churches”, which assert that God grants material prosperity to believers who have enough faith. They foster an entrepreneurial attitude, generous tithing and life improvement strategies.

In now predominant churches, economic problems are blamed on the work of the devil rather than on government incompetence. Unemployment and stagnation are attributed to the collective sin of the nation rather than to ANC policy failure or corruption. 

Pastors encourage congregations to pray for leaders to mend their ways, rather than agitating for their removal. They also argue that Christians — or people who say they are Christians — should be in positions of leadership in the country to promote moral regeneration. 

The ANC has adapted to this changing spiritual landscape far better than most opposition parties. Jacob Zuma tapped into the currents early and adroitly, becoming pastor of the Full Gospel Church, the eThekwini Community Church and the Miracles Gospel Church in advance of the Polokwane conference that brought him to power. 

Zuma’s ANC established a pattern in which ANC leaders use the Easter weekend on election years to visit the full range of denominations. Last weekend, for example, Ramaphosa attended a Free State church and a Methodist service in Eastern Cape, and joined EFF president Julius Malema at the annual Easter pilgrimage to St Engenas Zion Christian Church in Moria. 

ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula noted this past weekend that ANC leaders were “not pure”. Their souls needed to be enriched because “they too can make mistakes … That is why we place the church at the centre of the work that we do.”

While this may not amount to a winning strategy, it is likely to reduce the scale of the ANC’s electoral decline. 

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