Tag: trump

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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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SA’s human rights crisis

ANTHONY BUTLER: Worsening human rights crisis a reality that cannot be ignored

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have joined the US in painting a depressing picture of SA

First published in Business Day

15 August 2025

A dispassionate assessment may be better than a “national dialogue” even if it is wrong. After all, its findings can be rationally accepted or contested. For example, the department of international relations & co-operation reacted negatively this week to the release of the US state department’s global report on human rights, describing its SA section as “inaccurate and deeply flawed”.

The congressionally mandated annual review has long been a staple reference work for international human rights advocates. This year’s delayed issue follows a shake-up at the department’s bureau for democracy, human rights & labour, which US secretary of state Marco Rubio previously lambasted as a platform for “left-wing activists”. 

The “reoriented” state department assessment cites the signing into law of the Expropriation Bill as a “substantially worrying step towards land expropriation of Afrikaners and further abuses against racial minorities in the country”, and highlights claimed “antisemitic rhetoric” at high levels of the government. These are tendentious claims and they can be contested.

SA is not the only country whose human rights environment has supposedly worsened in a manner convenient for US foreign policy. For example, this year’s report took aim at Brazilian courts for suppressing the speech of supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Favourites of President Donald Trump, such as Israel and Russia, received implausibly positive assessments. The host of US migrant detention centres, El Salvador — castigated only a year ago for arbitrary killings, torture and harsh and life-threatening prison conditions — suddenly smells of roses. 

However, other assessments of the human rights situation in SA also paint a depressing picture of the country, most notably the annual country reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Amnesty points to a worsening situation in several areas: high levels of gender-based violence, with perpetrators enjoying impunity; the judicial system failing to process cases; a high murder rate accompanied by a decline in police capacity to respond; nationwide water shortages attributed to vandalism and ageing infrastructure and a white paper that threatens to erode refugee rights. 

HRW points to anti-immigration rhetoric and xenophobia, increasing violence against women and girls, and a growing scourge of severe child malnutrition, with severe food poverty among 23% of children. It also details unlawful arrests and deportations of asylum seekers. Both reports note excessive force in criminal justice, increasing deaths from police action, and violence against human rights defenders — including killings linked to their work by state actors. 

It is reasonable to question the veracity of the products of the Trump administration, but no doubt we should also read the publications of do-gooder international organisations with a sceptical eye. Such reports exhibit political and cultural biases, the influence of their funders, and often fail to capture the situation on the ground accurately. But when they all suggest there is a deteriorating human rights environment, it is important to sit up and listen: to go beyond reflex rebuttals and take seriously the evidence upon which these claims are based. 

SA is fortunate to have a state president who has viewed human rights not just as legal principles but as core values that should guide governance, promote equality and ensure dignity for all, driven by his understanding of constitutionalism and a belief in inherent human worth. Indeed, Amnesty had a pivotal influence on Cyril Ramaphosa’s life, campaigning for his release during his first detention, funding his family’s legal expenses, and subsequently offering support to make his life after detention more tolerable.

What differentiates the assessments of external organisations from a domestic “national dialogue” is that they allow us to compare change over time and across countries. They are grounded in factual claims that can be contested or accepted. In contrast, the national dialogue will only generate further indeterminacy and ambiguity. 

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

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Trump

ANTHONY BUTLER: Let’s send Zuma to join Musk in helping the Trump administration

SA’s former president was a trailblazer of best practice in ‘apex executive branch management’

First published in Business Day

15 November 2024

by ANTHONY BUTLER

Republican president-elect Donald Trump. Picture: JAY PAUL/REUTERS

Republican president-elect Donald Trump. Picture: JAY PAUL/REUTERS

SA has already sacrificed our beloved Elon Musk to the Trump administration, but we can do more.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm memorably said more than two decades ago that the US has elected to the presidency “a greater number of ignorant dumbos than any other republic”.

He also observed that the US political system “makes it almost impossible to elect to the presidency persons of visible ability and distinction”.

He offered the reassuring reminder that “the great US ship of state has sailed on as though it made very little difference that the man on the bridge was Andrew Johnson and not Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and not McKinley, Mrs Wilson and not Woodrow Wilson, Truman and not Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and not Kennedy, Ford and not Nixon”.

For Hobsbawm “a strong economy and great power can be politically almost foolproof”.

While Hobsbawm’s assessment of US leadership selection is unfair — Ronald Reagan was arguably a successful foreign policy president, and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were leaders of great ability — his central point about the institutional resilience of the US political system has much merit.

The constitution gives effect to key lessons of western political theory. The separation of powers remains a deep obstacle to personal rule, despite incoming Republican majorities in both national legislatures, and the recent appointment of madness-leaning and dim-witted supreme court justices.

The constitution entrenches federalism: most decisions are reserved to lower levels of government notwithstanding Trump’s threat to punish cities and states that have offended him.

The US is also a complex and diverse society. Who but a bigot would not celebrate that, on November 5, Sarah McBride became the first transgender person to be elected to the US Congress as representative for Delaware?

Trump will no doubt cause harm in domestic affairs. Religious fundamentalism, racism, anti-science gibberish, and misogyny will inform policy-making. Darwin and Harry Potter will be excised from even more school libraries. The revolving doors between federal government and business will spin faster. Undocumented migrants will fall victim to a chaotic “deportation” programme.

These policies will be contested, and reversible, even if the suffering they will cause is not. US presidents, however, have greater power in foreign affairs, where there are few checks on their authority. While Trump subscribes to the “madman” theory of foreign policy — he thinks his bluster secures concessions from other countries — he is relatively easy for foreign leaders and diplomats to read, and flattery and token concessions easily outlast his attention span.

The global clean energy transition is linked to the most irreversible challenge of all, and Trump wants to exit the Paris accord. Renewable energy is so advantageous in terms of jobs and costs, however, that it will still sweep across Asia, Europe, and Trump-supporting states in his own country, such as Iowa and Texas.

There are minor ideological differences between SA’s unity government and the incoming US administration. SA believes in improving human welfare and liberation from oppression around the globe. The US, in contrast, seeks to impose capitalism, accurate vote counting, dental hygiene and an unimaginable level of tax compliance on nominally postcolonial states.

Despite these differences, SA can — for once — offer technical support to a fledgling US administration. While the US is in most respects the world’s most advanced banana republic, former president Jacob Zuma was a trailblazer of international best practice in “apex executive branch management”.

The global trend has been for the office of the president to serve as a hub for power networks that link banks, big businesses, oligarchs, the political system, and regulatory agencies dedicated to legal and tax compliance. In this field, our former president had “visible ability and distinction”. Musk is not enough. We must also send them Zuma.

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