Tag: politics

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Presidents and patriarchy

ANTHONY BUTLER | Patriarchy can create unexpected paths to power for women leaders

Female politicians may exploit sexist assumptions to emerge as consensus candidates in divided systems

First published in Business Day

May 29, 2026

Women around the world sometimes observe that there are potential costs toalways having a man as national leader. Bias has historically filtered out capable women, while the best candidate is surely more likely to emerge when the full population is genuinely in contention.

A democracy better reflects its people when leadership is no longer drawnfrom only one half of the population, and this strengthens citizens’ sense ofinclusion and trust in institutions.

Women bring different life experiences to the policy process, especially when it comes to healthcare, workplace discrimination and reproductive rights.

Some political science research controversially suggests women lawmakers tend to be more collaborative. Gender-diverse leadership teams in both politics and business arguably produce better decision-making outcomes.

If the path to power is harder for women, those who tread it may become more formidable than their male counterparts. British prime ministerMargaret Thatcher cultivated an iron lady persona deliberately, with voice coaching and a confrontational style, to neutralise prejudice about “female weakness”.

Germany’s Angela Merkel, quiet and methodical, outlasted rivals throughpatience and steely resolve. Merkel also benefited from an “underestimationadvantage” that gave her an informational edge: male politicians assumed shewas not a threat right up to the moment they were outmanoeuvred by her.

Sceptics claim it can’t happen here. South Africa’s constitution may be gender-progressive, but the country remains deeply patriarchal. Customary law, traditional leadership structures and social norms across all racial groups subordinate women. Gender-based violence rates are among the world’s highest, and women remain underrepresented in economic roles.

While these observations may be accurate, sexist assumptions about women’sweakness can in some circumstances create political opportunities. When twopowerful male-led factions are deadlocked, a woman can emerge preciselybecause she’s perceived as non-threatening.

The men involved may each prefer her to their rival, calculating that she will be malleable or easily removed. This patronising assumption is often what gets a woman leader through the door, after which she may prove anything but feeble. 

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia emerged partly because she was seen as less threatening to various factional interests after years of warlord-driven civil war. 

Cristina Kirchner in Argentina and Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka initially benefited from being seen as extensions of their husbands’ legacies, a form of reflected legitimacy that depended on patriarchal assumptions about women’s derivative power. 

Even Theresa May’s ascent to the British premiership in 2016 owed something to the way male Brexiteers attacked each other until she was the only one left standing. 

Women’s potential advantage can be redoubled when power is shared. National Assembly speaker Thoko Didiza’s name keeps appearing in ANC succession discussions because she is experienced and capable but also because she is perceived as less factionally divisive than Paul Mashatile or Fikile Mbalula — and also better suited to coalition dealmaking with other political parties. 

Women can exploit a “mother of the nation” framing in patriarchal societies, accessing a form of moral authority denied to men. They are perceived as above the dirty business of factional politics, as nurturers rather than competitors. This set of deeply patronising assumptions can be strategically useful for an ambitious politician. 

There is no risk-free way to the top, of course. Women still confront the “glass cliff” phenomenon, in which they are disproportionately chosen to lead organisations or countries during crises when men have declined the poisoned chalice or dodged the bullet. 

Nonetheless, the uncomfortable implication of this argument is that some women’s political advancement may depend not on overcoming patriarchy, but on exploiting it. 

Like any system of systematic misjudgement, patriarchy creates exploitable inefficiencies, and politically astute women can use these to get elected — and then, hopefully, to govern brilliantly. 

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

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From plurality to presidency

ANTHONY BUTLER | DA faces coalition challenge despite largest party hopes

Parties could back third-party candidate for president if it comes down to a power play

First published in Business Day

May 15, 2026

Newly elected Democratic Alliance (DA) federal leader Geordin Hill-Lewis made some striking remarks in his acceptance speech on 12 April. “The question”, he first asked, “is whether the DA can lead the country … Whether we can become the largest party in national government”. The new leader’s answer was a “resounding YES! Yes we can!”

He continued by setting out the “mission you have assigned to me: to grow the DA into the largest party in South Africa, and to lead a new national government.”

Reactions to the federal leader’s mission statement focused on the first element, with many commentators rightly observing that winning the biggest vote share will be a huge task.

Equally taxing, however, will be the second challenge with which Hill-Lewis conflates it: converting largest party status into the ultimate prize of leading national government.

After all, it is quite common in democracies for the largest party to find itself excluded from the governing coalition. Ideologically, it may sit at one end of a spectrum, allowing centrist and smaller parties to form alternative an “anyone but them” blocking coalition.

Smaller parties may prefer to coalesce together because doing avoids the condescension and disadvantage that befall a “junior partner”.

If the largest party rejects patronage politics, moreover, smaller resource-seeking parties that need to feed their impoverished activists and voters may simply decide to eat together.

Meanwhile we do not have a process for selecting a formateur – the person initially tasked with trying to form a government. This role is likely to fall by default to the state president elected within 14 days of the election outcome, and there is every chance that he or she will not be the leader of the largest party — especially if the largest party is the DA.

The formateur, as Cyril Ramaphosa has shown, gets to shape the initial proposal, the portfolio distribution, and the policy compromises that are on the table. This agenda-setting power matters because the first credible offer usually anchors subsequent negotiations.

A DA leader could perhaps assemble a “removal van” coalition forged primarily to eject the governing party rather than united round other shared commitments. The “moonshot pact”, the minefield of exploding egos through which John Steenhuisen picked his way, serves as a reminder of how dangerous such an enterprise can be.

Hill-Lewis’s speech suggests he has been tasked personally by his party with “leading a new national government”. He will, however, confront the most dismal question any ambitious but pinkish SA politician must ask. Can a white man like me really become state president?

Around the world, of course, party leaders quite often decide not to seek the premiership themselves and designate someone from their party who is more acceptable to potential coalition partners.

The most striking modern example is India in 2004. When a Congress Party-led coalition came to power, its chairperson Sonia Gandhi unexpectedly relinquished the prime ministership to Manmohan Singh. The official narrative centred on Gandhi’s “inner voice,” but the reality was more complex. Her Italian birth had become controversial and there were legal challenges being prepared against her eligibility. Singh was chosen precisely because he was a technocrat who could hold a fractious coalition together — he was respected, non-threatening to coalition partners, and lacking any independent power base.

The DA leader might likewise select a coalition-compatible presidential nominee while exercising real power himself behind the scenes. This Putinesque manoeuvre, of course, is also something an ailing African National Congress (ANC) is quite likely to attempt.

Finally, of course, there could always be an agreement among two equally matched parties, the DA and the ANC, to back a state president from a third party such as the Inkatha Freedom Party. President Velenkosini Hlabisa anyone?

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town

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Predicting future presidents

ANTHONY BUTLER | Why it is so difficult to predict who will follow Ramaphosa

Lessons from Japan and India point to the once-dominant party’s possible future

March 20, 2026 at 05:00 am

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

ANC supporters celebrate the party's 113th anniversary in Cape Town on Saturday.
Deputy president Paul Mashatile’s ‘front-runner’ status for leadership of the ANC and the state is fundamentally flawed in the current political reailty, according to the writer. (REUTERS/ESA ALEXANDER)

The breezy confidence many political analysts display about the identity of SA’s next president is rather surprising. Predicting who will take over from Cyril Ramaphosa is in fact becoming increasingly difficult.

It has never been all that easy, of course. We have still not heard the full story of how Thabo Mbeki came to succeed Nelson Mandela. Jacob Zuma’s 2007 landslide victory in Polokwane, which guaranteed his ascension to the Union Buildings, shocked many observers, and we seem to have forgotten that Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, not Ramaphosa, could easily be state president now.

But the challenges of prediction have dramatically deepened. One feature of a “dominant party” such as the post-1994 ANC is that it held a majority of seats in the National Assembly. It could elect its chosen president immediately after national elections.

That explains why diligent scholars and journalists have become addicted to studying ANC factionalism, the mechanics of list processes, turmoil at provincial conferences and the machinations of regional power brokers.

Paul Mashatile (Freddy Mavunda)

The trouble is that the ANC is no longer a dominant party, having secured only 40% of votes in the 2024 national and provincial elections. What happens when a dominant party weakens but does not disappear?

Lessons from abroad

Consider what happened to the national leadership under other formerly dominant parties, such as the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that governed Japan unchallenged in 1955-93, and the Indian National Congress (INC) that controlled India in 1947-89.

In 1993 the LDP briefly lost power when a coalition of opposition parties formed a government under Morihiro Hosokawa. When the LDP returned to power, party factions began viewing prime ministers as temporary coalition managers, and leadership turnover dramatically accelerated.

Tenure was tied to election results, coalition management and factional bargaining. Shinzo Abe’s first premiership lasted just one year, and Yasuo Fukuda and Taro Aso survived little longer. The result was at most single-term leadership, though stability was later restored to a degree after 2012 under Abe.

When the INC was dominant, leadership authority was concentrated in national figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. When the INC lost its parliamentary majority in 1989 coalition government became normal and the party’s internal authority fragmented. New party leaders such as PV Narasimha Rao, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi faced relentless internal competition as they sought to build majority governing coalitions.

Flawed assumptions

Under coalition systems, leaders are vulnerable because electoral setbacks trigger internal leadership challenges, while coalition partners restrict feasible leadership choices. The need for state power is ultimately decisive, so the management of coalitions becomes central. Meanwhile, factions look for opportunities to displace a leader whose autonomy is constrained by the need to maintain a coalition.

That suggests analysts should abandon the lazy assumption that two-term leadership is the norm, that historic pathways from deputy to leader still exist, and that party leader and coalition government head will be the same person.

One useful model was advanced by Mbeki when his second term as ANC and state president was drawing to a close in 2007. He ran for a third term as party leader, and his slate included Dlamini-Zuma as deputy president. The clear intention was that Mbeki and his team would steer the country from Luthuli House, while Dlamini-Zuma was elevated to a state presidency henceforth under strict party direction.

Assumptions about deputy president Paul Mashatile’s supposed “front-runner” status for a two-term leadership of the ANC and the state are therefore triply wrong-headed. He may lose altogether; there is a strong likelihood that no leader will serve longer than a single term in future; and the party may deploy a more junior leader to run a coalition government as state president.

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

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Patrice Motsepe for president?

ANTHONY BUTLER | PM27 campaign fuels debate over Motsepe’s future

ANC condemns ‘divisive’ campaign as party’s 2027 conference looms

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

March 06, 2026

Patrice Motsepe. (Gavin Barker/BackpagePix)

Speculation refuses to die down that the 64-year-old mining magnate and president of the Confederation of African Football, Patrice Motsepe, might emerge as the technocratic saviour of the ANC at its December 2027 conference.

This idea, long circulating, has received a major boost with the appearance last week of a “PM27” campaign website urging South Africans to position the billionaire as a future leader. Motsepe has not endorsed the site but nor has he repudiated it.

On Monday, the ANC “unequivocally condemned” the PM27 campaign as “divisive” and “an attempt to derail the ANC from its historic mission and responsibilities”. The glorious movement called on “all those involved to desist immediately”.

While Motsepe is a very capable person, he has not in the past been strongly associated with politics. The late Nthato Motlana, black business pioneer and close confidant of Nelson Mandela, once counterposed one lacklustre captain of industry, Cyril Ramaphosa, to Motsepe, a “real businessman” who took on near-exhausted mines and combined low base salaries with profit sharing to generate huge profits.

For Motlana, Motsepe’s strength was precisely that he had “no connections with the ANC … his life is business”. Active ANC and communist party networks and the residual power of the union he created were crucial to Ramaphosa’s rise to the deputy presidency and then the presidency. Motsepe has no such linkages around which to build a political coalition.

It is sometimes claimed that Ramaphosa is pushing for Motsepe to succeed to the ANC and state presidencies, a notion based partly on the involvement of a few CR2017 campaigners in PM27 but also on a submerged belief that Africans are naturally nepotistic and get on handsomely with their in-laws — neither of which appears to be true of Ramaphosa and Motsepe.

Even if Ramaphosa was in favour of such a succession, the history of outgoing presidents handing over power to their preferred successors is poor: Jacob Zuma did not want him and Thabo Mbeki definitely did not want Zuma.

Motsepe’s chances are further exaggerated due to three wildly inaccurate suppositions. The first is that a billionaire can buy ANC conference votes. Even if one accepts that there may be some factual basis for this reprehensible stereotyping, delegates are not allowed to take cellphones into the voting booth and cannot prove which way they voted. Indeed, they can happily take money from all contenders without compromising their independence.

The second false supposition is that business folk are cleverer than politicians and can do their jobs far better if only they so choose. This multiracial and cross-cultural fantasy is especially widely espoused by rich businessmen who made their fortunes selling hair products.

It is true that Motsepe’s African Rainbow Minerals was a huge accomplishment, but he has never held elected office in national politics and has no experience managing the quite different complexity this world exhibits.

It is useful here to reflect on the brief political career of Roger Jardine, a former CEO of Aveng Group and Primedia and chair of FirstRand, who launched the inaptly named Change Starts Now movement in December 2023 to contest the 2024 national elections.

Boosted by huge donations from unusually public-spirited corporations, trailed by illustrious campaign managers, speechwriters’ obligatory flights of inspirational rhetoric scrolling relentlessly down his omnipresent teleprompters, Jardine’s campaign crashed and burned within weeks.

The third false supposition — since Ramaphosa is probably preparing to step down from the party leadership next year — is that “there is no one else”. But there will always be someone else and not just the lamentable frontrunners, Paul Mashatile and Fikile Mbalula, who has a better chance of winning than a rank political outsider and amateur.

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

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A DA dream team?

ANTHONY BUTLER: Hill-Lewis and Sarupen — the dream team

April’s elective conference could usher in batch of younger DA leaders

February 06, 2026 at 05:00 am

First published in Business Day

Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis is adamant it will be "business as usual" in the city during the national shutdown planned by the EFF for next Monday. File photo.
Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis is adamant it will be “business as usual” in the city during the national shutdown planned by the EFF for next Monday. File photo. (Esa Alexander)

The internal politics of the DA has suddenly become uncharacteristically interesting.

In the past, a variety of factors conspired to make it almost impossible to understand the party’s internal dynamics. Only party insiders could reliably recall the difference between the federal leader, the chair of the federal council, and the federal chair.

Even the select group sharing this secret knowledge disagreed about whether the federal leader or chair of the council — currently John Steenhuisen and Helen Zille, respectively — is the more influential figure.

Deputy finance minister Ashor Sarupen. File photo
Deputy finance minister Ashor Sarupen. Picture: (JEFFREY ABRAHAMS/GALLO IMAGES)

A confluence of factors means delegates will elect new leaders to both key offices at the party’s conference in April. Zille is campaigning to be mayor of Joburg in local elections, which are expected later this year, and will probably not accept nomination to serve another term. For his part, Steenhuisen announced this week that he would stand down to spend more time on his ministerial portfolio.

In an era of coalition politics, the DA matters because it will probably be the largest or second-largest party for the next two or three national election cycles, potentially participating routinely in unity governments.

What makes matters more compelling is the spectre of a generational change. EFF generalissimo Julius Malema is 44 years old, in certain respects a terrible infant, but no longer the enfant terrible of South African politics.

Key contenders for key DA offices are deputy finance minister Ashor Sarupen, who is just 37, and sprightly Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, who is two years younger. Long shots such as communications minister Solly Malatsi and the leader of the opposition in Gauteng, Solly Msimang, are only a little older.

There has been lobbying in recent months for a Zille-aligned “dream team” of Hill-Lewis for the federal leadership and Sarupen for the federal council chair. An alternative candidate for federal leader would be Malatsi, who is a capable policymaker and is potentially more appealing than other candidates to younger black voters. However, Malatsi does not yet enjoy widespread support across the party’s base.

There is also Western Cape premier Alan Winde, who is undoubtedly a safe pair of hands but does not represent the exciting change of style and direction the party arguably needs.

Former leader Tony Leon, who has the ear of major party donors, notably endorsed Hill-Lewis very quickly.

Hill-Lewis does not want to cut short his term as a successful Cape Town mayor, but the DA could countenance combined national leadership and municipal office for a year or two — something Zille herself accomplished as leader after 2007, as both mayor and then as provincial premier.

The election to succeed Zille in the federal council is likely to be more competitive. Sarupen is well suited to a low-key interpretation of the federal role, with deep expertise in electoral campaigning and experience in the National Treasury.

The strongest contender he faces could be Dean Macpherson. He is just 40 but became shadow trade, industry & competition minister as early as 2017. He is closely associated with outgoing federal leader Steenhuisen, for whom he has served as campaign manager, and he was appointed public works & infrastructure minister in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government of national unity.

Addressing the Cape Town Press Club yesterday, he set out impressive achievements in the field of construction and infrastructure investment and detailed his apparently successful curtailing of the activities of the so-called construction mafia in KwaZulu-Natal and, more recently, across much of the rest of the country.

Macpherson declined to comment on whether he would accept nomination to the position of chair of the federal council, whether out of procedural propriety or genuine indecision. I for one interpreted his answer as a yes.

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

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Post-truth democracies

ANTHONY BUTLER: Popular instinct rises against elite judgment in post-truth world

First published in Business Day

January 23, 2026

US President Donald Trump speaks during the 56th annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 21 2026. (Picture: DENIS BALIBOUSE/Reuters)

When Donald Trump addressed world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday it felt like the much-heralded “post-truth” world had truly arrived.

The US president strung together a litany of demonstrably false claims, such as that the US “gave Greenland back” to Denmark after World War 2 (it had never become US territory) and that there are no wind farms in China (it generates more wind energy than any other country).

But none of this is entirely new. As the historian Sophia Rosenfeld has observed, democracy has always been about who decides what is true. Representative democracy embodies the promise that citizens, drawing on their lived experience and common sense, can collectively judge what is right and good.

Governing complex societies requires specialised knowledge, such as a mastery of statistics, law and economics, which must be generated and interpreted by experts. Citizens bring values and practical insight to democracy; elites filter information, weigh evidence and transform competing ideas and claims into feasible policies. Democracy does not capitulate to expertise, but it cannot dispense with it either.

For much of the history of Western democracy popular participation grew while states created professional public services, universities trained experts and ostensibly objective methods for justifying policy, such as statistical analysis, acquired the appearance of neutrality.

This settlement always carried the seeds of its own destruction. Whenever knowledge becomes purely technical and self-referential the ability to participate in debate narrows and decisions are taken without popular engagement.

In populist counterreactions, citizens reject the monopolisation of truth by elites and reclaim a place for common sense and ordinary judgment. This can widen participation and break the spell of elite and expert complacency, but it can easily slide into contempt for knowledge, the treatment of evidence as manipulation and the castigation of experts and expertise.

The contemporary “post-truth” moment in the West is therefore not an unprecedented collapse of reason but rather the breakdown of a long-standing and unstable balance. Today’s struggle over what Rosenfeld calls “epistemic authority” — who decides what counts as fact — is worsened by social media’s circulation of information, stripped of context, while algorithms reward novelty, outrage and tribal loyalty.

All democracies, not just Western ones, are vulnerable to “epistemic breakdown”: distrust of institutions, populist suspicion of experts and competing truth claims. Even in the Thembu tribal meetings of Nelson Mandela’s youth, where “all men were to be heard and a decision was taken together as a people”, there was an elite side to the epistemic bargain. The regent would sum up what had been said and form a “consensus” among the diverse opinions. Democracy survives only if truth is filtered, stabilised and institutionalised.

Elites and experts have to accept that knowledge without legitimacy will cause a backlash. Citizens must recognise that popular common sense without evidence and expertise invites manipulation. Democracy fails when either becomes predominant; it survives only when a precarious balance between them is maintained.

The greatest challenge for all democracies — and perhaps especially for newer democracies in middle-income countries such as South Africa — is that the factors that disrupt the uneasy balance between elite judgment and popular instinct are not easy to control or change.

We can in principle regulate social media and contain the potential threats posed by fresh technological developments such as AI. But declining trust in institutions, resentment of elites and the circulation of conspiracies all feed on deeper social divisions, including economic inequality and exclusion from meaningful citizenship.

When material divides widen, institutions lose credibility and become deeply detached from expert knowledge. When citizens inhabit dramatically different material worlds, it becomes impossible to sustain a shared account of reality and expertise starts to look like privilege hiding behind a different name.

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

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Undesirable leaders

ANTHONY BUTLER: No avoiding the glut of putrid political leaders

Does power attract twisted personalities, or does it turn decent people into monsters?

First published in Business Day

January 09, 2026

'Failed politicians never go away. At best they linger and whinge. At worst they re-invent themselves and return to power.'
Power-hungry individuals are certainly drawn to high office, craving status, recognition and control. (123RF/prazis )

As citizens embark on this year’s political journey, they must reckon with the disconcertingly wide array of unappealing political leaders worldwide.

According to contrarian political scientist Brian Klaas, three character traits are widespread among such leaders. The first is Machiavellianism, defined by scheming and interpersonal manipulation.

Machiavellians use deceit, fabrication and inflated credentials to secure positions of authority, and they treat colleagues as pawns rather than human beings.

A second trait is psychopathy — an inability to feel empathy — which is accompanied by impulsivity, recklessness and aggression. Psychopaths can ascend to political office by employing superficial charm: they do not react to the pain of others, but they can mimic empathy to manipulate those they intend to exploit.

Psychopaths’ brains are inactive in regions associated with moral decision-making, allowing them to view people as tools rather than as human beings, facilitating amoral choices, and reducing hesitation when committing monstrous acts.

The third trait, narcissism, is characterised by arrogance and grandiosity. Narcissists are disproportionately drawn to power because they possess an inflated sense of entitlement and seek constant fawning from subordinates. Because they are so confident, they fail to recognise their own incompetence until the system they lead suffers catastrophic failure.

Attracting the corruptible

Why are such traits so widespread among political leaders? Do positions of great power attract twisted personalities, or does political power turn decent people into monsters? As Klaas puts it, does power corrupt, or does it simply attract the corruptible?

Power-hungry individuals are certainly drawn to high office, craving status, recognition and control. They may be unusually effective at navigating party selection processes and political campaigns. Their superficial charm makes them appear likeable and competent, and they are willing to fabricate credentials or lie about their past. They project a sense of certainty easily mistaken for competence.

Humans are hardwired to favour leaders who project strength, masculinity and dominance, which were survival advantages on the prehistoric savanna but can be irrelevant or dangerous today. These archaic biases persist, leading to an irrational preference for physically imposing men — a shirtless Vladimir Putin comes to mind — during perceived security threats, which can be fabricated.

Power also changes incumbents, however humbly their careers may begin. Psychologist Dacher Keltner has shown that gaining power can shift one’s cognitive orientation from cautious to proactive and risk-oriented. Powerful individuals come to believe, wrongly, they can control outcomes, which results in flawed risk assessments and ultimately gambling with people’s lives.

Moreover, as people feel more powerful, they lose social inhibitions, eat impulsively, drive recklessly or engage in sexual affairs, because they no longer worry what others think of them.

Most important of all, even decent political leaders face “dirty hands” problems — moral dilemmas in which they must commit unprincipled acts to achieve a greater moral good.

Machiavellians and narcissists can do wrong easily, untroubled by conscience, but the dilemma has also confronted moral leaders throughout history.

Winston Churchill allowed the HMAS Sydney to be sunk by Nazi forces to protect the secret that the Enigma codes had been cracked, sacrificing lives that could have been saved to help win the wider war.

Abraham Lincoln used bribery to secure the passage of the 13th Amendment, acting dishonestly to end the greater evil of slavery.

Less grandly, and more ubiquitously, politicians everywhere make trades with nefarious funders whose backing is required to win elections. In middle-income countries such as SA, such disturbing moral calculations are routine.

Ultimately, the public expects politicians to be principled, but leaders must perform unprincipled acts to survive and, perhaps, to preserve society.

What appears to be a corrosion of character is frequently just the weight of governing in an inherently immoral situation.

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

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The G20 revealed a shift in South Africa’s foreign policy

ANTHONY BUTLER: Shifting from China focus to balanced foreign policy

Balancing global partnerships is SA’s new foreign strategy

5 December 2025

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s firm handling of his US counterpart during a successful G20 process has modified popular views about his capabilities. He is still a lousy president on domestic matters, the conventional wisdom now goes, but he is rather good at foreign affairs.

However, the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is far from clear-cut. Countries seek agreements with their peers, but any deal must be ratified at home by legislatures, interest groups, citizens and political parties. Negotiators respond to the preferences of their domestic constituents while using pressures at home as leverage in international forums. In practice, the two levels of negotiation are simultaneous and continuous.

South Africa’s foreign policy has long been criticised for insufficiently prioritising economic growth and development at home. Turf wars between trade and foreign affairs officials have made an integrated approach hard, while debates about race and transformation have undermined co-operation between big business and government.

The major international crises during Ramaphosa’s first term — the pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Palestine war — created space for a reorientation of Pretoria’s goals and instruments. Behind the smokescreen of a theatrical confrontation with President Donald Trump, the final G20 summit revealed three related shifts in South Africa’s foreign policy.

After a decade of emphasis on a China-dominated Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) forum, a significant rebalancing has taken place. Former president Thabo Mbeki cautioned about the danger of falling into a new “colonial relationship” with China, noting that exporting raw materials while importing Chinese manufactured goods would leave Africa “condemned to underdevelopment” in a replication of European colonialism.

The new, more balanced, approach recognises that South Africa benefits from Chinese markets and financing but that we also need European investment and global standards access, and alternative vehicles for South-South co-operation.

In a second development, the G20 cycle underscored the maturing and pragmatic relationship between South Africa and Europe. European countries remain by far the biggest investors in this country, and the eurozone hugely surpasses China as South Africa’s biggest trading partner.

The G20 summit unveiled a sharper instrumental and pragmatic focus on critical minerals, sustainable energy transition and trade standards, in place of previous performative issues of political alignment and misalignment.

South Africa signalled deepening co-operation on energy transition supply chains, with the critical minerals needed for batteries, wind magnets and hydrogen infrastructure framed as a durable area of strategic alignment. South Africa wants investment in local beneficiation while Europe wants reliable supply.

In a third development on the margins of the G20 process, leaders of the three Ibsa countries — India, Brazil and South Africa — indicated their determination to revitalise the forum as a channel for South-South co-operation outside the broader Brics agenda.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has established a close working relationship with Ramaphosa, while India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was uncharacteristically effusive. Ibsa is the one major trilateral South-South forum that allows South Africa strategic autonomy, avoids being folded into Sino-centric diplomacy, and facilitates co-operation between large democracies (or just-about-democracies in India’s case) that share concerns about norms, institutions, trade and energy transition financing.

Positive signalling about Ibsa takes place while Europe and the US are seeking non-Chinese industrial partners, Brazil is concerned about mineral supply chains and energy transition, India is positioning itself as a hedge power, and South Africa wants South-South development co-operation and beneficiation without sacrificing Western investment. Ibsa provides a platform for these various goals to align without the geopolitical baggage that sometimes surrounds Brics.

The real test of these three shifts in South Africa’s international orientation lies not in their intrinsic elegance and rationality, but rather in their sustainability, and in whether they will deliver the fruits of stability, co-operation and economic development.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town. He recently published a book about the post-apartheid presidents, ‘Presidential Power’.

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Ramaphosa is likely to see out his second full term as state president

ANTHONY BUTLER: Enemies dream, but Ramaphosa is enjoying his presidential role

Few believe his deputy, Paul Mashatile, would improve the ANC’s dire electoral prospects

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

November 21, 2025

Cyril Ramaphosa is unlikely to be forced from office because neither the ANC nor parliament has the will or unity to remove him, and he has multiple avenues to stay in power even if party dynamics shift, says the writer. (Thapelo Morebudi)

Recent weeks have brought another outbreak of wishful thinking among President Cyril Ramaphosa’s enemies. Symptoms include a recurrent and feverish dream in which he is on the verge of resigning, perhaps to spend more time with his cattle. There is also a delirious fantasy that the ANC’s national executive committee will summon the collective will to oust him from office.

The president will survive until the December 2027 elective conference of the ANC, the dreamers usually concede. But they insist he will be ejected from office soon afterwards, perhaps as part of a millenarian frenzy that propels deputy president Paul Mashatile into the Union Buildings.

The sad end to the terms of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma is typically brought forward as evidence. Both were forced to resign under the threat of a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly.

Is Ramaphosa really destined for a similar exit? There is no indication that he is willing to step down and he seems to be rather enjoying himself. Mbeki and Zuma have taught us that politicians with the drive to reach the highest office will not easily relinquish power.

Few ANC leaders are convinced that Mashatile would be an effective state president. Fewer still believe he would improve the party’s dire electoral prospects. If he becomes ANC president it will be due to his mastery of internal ANC machinations alone.

The former liberation movement no longer has a majority in the National Assembly and this is the only body that can remove a president through a vote of no confidence. Such a vote would almost certainly be held by secret ballot.

In a landmark 2017 case the Constitutional Court held that the speaker has discretion. The present speaker — for a variety of reasons — will not concede to pressure for an open vote. Who can be confident that a majority of MPs would vote for Ramaphosa’s defenestration in a secret ballot, given that so few have undergone a genuine Pauline conversion?

The ANC would be threatened with a fresh and possibly existential crisis, and Ramaphosa could exercise other options. Mbeki and his cronies created the Congress of the People to pressure the faction that ousted him. Zuma formed the MK party in the same spirit.

While Ramaphosa is unlikely to create a new party, it is quite common for presidents to switch parties — or abandon party affiliation altogether — to protect the “broader national interest” (in other words, their own continuation in office).

Take Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president in 2019-22. He ditched the social democrats, with whom he was long associated, and was elected with the Social Liberal Party. After clashes with the party leadership he left while still president and governed without a party for more than two years, only later joining the Liberal Party.

Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, from whom Ramaphosa may have acquired his fondness for Ankole cattle and associated sofa beds, originally came to office through the National Resistance Movement, which was not a party at all until it suited Museveni for it to become one.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s leader, was part of the Islamist Welfare Party and then the Virtue Party, both later banned, before co-founding the Justice & Development Party in 2001, only to remain in power for two decades as prime minister and then president.

The fact that presidents can remain in office by switching parties, creating new parties to retain or consolidate power, or rising above all party affiliations does not mean they will do so. However, such a possibility introduces further uncertainty into the calculations of those who might want to oust them.

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

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Bifurcated political systems

ANTHONY BUTLER: Does Mamdani have what it takes to deliver change in New York?

First published in Business Day

November 07, 2025

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York City, US, in this November 5 2025 file photo. (Kylie Cooper)

Right-wing curmudgeons around the world are eagerly anticipating New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s forthcoming collision with reality. They are certain there is no way a 34-year-old political novice can transition from fronting a campaign to running a huge city such as New York. I’m not so sure.

Mamdani’s operation was close to flawless, propelling him from little-known state assembly member to Democratic Party nominee in months. He secured the right endorsements from prominent figures such as Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez. And he raised large sums from small donors ― the average donation was about $80 ― and so avoided indebtedness to powerful interests.

His campaign focused on the affordability crisis in the city, proposing rent freezes, free transit systems and higher taxes on the wealthy. Such complex issues will not allow for simple solutions. As equally great cities like Paris and London have shown, however, there are plenty of interventions that are both pro-poor and pro-economy.

Mamdani has credited his parents for stimulating his interest in politics, and he may have imbued from his mother, the brilliant filmmaker Mira Nair, an intense sense of appearance. Like the most natural politicians, Mamdani has crafted a persona that appeals to a wide constituency. He engages seemingly effortlessly in a continuous self-narration, an autobiographical performance of that persona embedded in his daily conduct.

He has campaigned on complex and sensitive issues, including the conflict in Gaza, without making mistakes and without simply rehearsing talking notes prepared for him by others. This suggests ― to a degree more and more unusual among professional politicians ― that he understands what he is saying, even when he is traversing a political minefield.

His father, the Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani, once wrote a critique of Americans’ framing of Islam and Muslims, pointing out that it was US support for anti-Soviet campaigns in Afghanistan during the 1980s that gave birth to modern militant jihad. This had the merit of being true.

Mahmood senior’s most influential book, however, was Citizen and Subject,published in 1996. Drawing on his research in SA and Uganda, he argued that the legacy of colonialism lived on in a distinct form of state power. Colonial rule in Africa created a dual or “bifurcated” political system that separated people into urban citizens and rural subjects. In cities, colonial governments established a civil legal order resembling European political rights, accessible only to settlers and a narrow African elite. In rural areas, colonisers ruled indirectly through customary authorities — mostly chiefs who were appointed and empowered to enforce “tradition” and control local populations.

Mamdani’s conception of the bifurcated state has travelled beyond African studies, not because of its nuance and accuracy, each of which is questionable, but because of its intrinsic political appeal. Researchers and activists have found parallels in India, where colonial indirect rule through princely states and tribal areas produced enduring differentiated citizenship, for example, through scheduled tribes.

In Indonesia and Malaysia, customary law and “native” political authority ostensibly continue to shape local governance and group rights. In Latin America, colonial authorities have arguably maintained communal land systems and traditional leaders as instruments of rural control.

Bold scholars have even applied the concept to Israel and Palestine, suggesting that the legal differences between citizens and people under military occupation echo the divide between citizen and subject. And in the US, indigenous nations and racially segregated governance carry echoes of a similar bifurcation.

This is a powerful sentiment that the mayor-elect has tapped into. Many people intuitively understand the idea of a contemporary subjecthood, a bifurcated reality in which it is we who are the subordinate population lacking substantive citizenship. The young Mamdani may have inherited a formula for fighting back against right-wing populism.

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