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The return of the ‘prodigal son’

Idon’t know why Ace Magashule confided in me two years ago that it was at his Bloemfontein house in December 2012 that a decision was taken to formally endorse Cyril Ramaphosa for the deputy presidency of the ANC. Central to the plan to bring back the billionaire businessman into active politics and into the party’s leadership were allies of the then party president Jacob Zuma. According to Magashule, who was then Free State premier and longtime ANC provincial chairperson, it was he and Zweli Mkhize, Zuma’s main ally from KwaZulu-Natal, who put the plan in motion to endorse Ramaphosa for the second highest position in the party.

It didn’t make political sense for Magashule to make this disclosure to me in 2017 about a political development that had happened five years previously. It also didn’t serve his interest to create a link between himself and Ramaphosa because by 2017 he was located firmly in the faction that opposed Ramaphosa’s bid for the ANC’s presidency. Magashule was at the time touted as the candidate for the position of ANC secretary-general on the ticket of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Ramaphosa’s main rival for the presidency. It then occurred to me that Magashule was trying to typecast Ramaphosa as a political lightweight who owed the resurgence of his political career to a group of provincial strongmen who served as Zuma’s lieutenants.

‘People try to create an impression we don’t like Comrade Cyril. I always remind people that Cyril Ramaphosa was actually pushed by the same people who are seen to be premier league,’ said Magashule, who together with David Mabuza, premier of Mpumalanga, and Supra Mahumapelo, premier of North West, made up the so-called premier league. ‘He was worried he wouldn’t make it. In 2012 people said Cyril is part of monopoly capital and we said: “We know Cyril. We worked with Cyril. What is the problem?”’

This conversation set me on a path to verify Magashule’s account, which was more or less corroborated and confirmed by Zweli Mkhize.

After the 2019 elections I went back to Magashule, who was now the secretary-general of the ANC, to double-check this story. He had more to say. ‘It was me and Zweli Mkhize that said we must bring Comrade Cyril as deputy president,’ Magashule told me. ‘We met at my house, yes, and then we said he should serve as the deputy [president]. And he didn’t want to. We had to convince him.’

So hesitant was Ramaphosa that Mkhize eventually had to give him a deadline or else they said they would have to find themselves another candidate. ‘We had to tell him, he must accept by 12 on the day conference began. We had to go and convince him to take that position.’

In our conversation in 2019, Magashule appeared to accept the political irony of his earlier position: that the group who once believed Ramaphosa should become the deputy president of the ANC, later pushed hard against his accession to the presidency.

‘When we spoke about Comrade Cyril, we said we needed a certain calibre of ANC leader. At the time we didn’t even think of Comrade Nkosazana [Dlamini-Zuma],’ Magashule explained.

It may be true that Dlamini-Zuma was purposely shifted to the African Union that year so she wouldn’t be a viable contender against Zuma, but a few years later the politics wheels had shifted.

With a smirk of sarcasm on his face, Magashule was quick to point out that those who were the first to push for Ramaphosa as president were most vehemently against his candidacy for the ANC deputy presidency five years previously. ‘You know Cosatu [the Congress of South African Trade Unions] and the SACP [South African Communist Party], they did not want Comrade Cyril. Not at all. They said he was the son of the bourgeoisie.’

For much of 2012, Ramaphosa’s name was loosely thrown around as a possible candidate for deputy president and was nominated for that position by ANC members in KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and Free State. It was an unorganised lobby who campaigned for Ramaphosa to become deputy president of the ANC, largely because the main preoccupation at the time was the looming contest between Jacob Zuma and his then deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe, for the presidency.

Both sides of the political divide at the time were unsettled by Motlanthe’s reluctance to openly campaign for the position of president. His one-foot-in, one-foot-out approach to political contestation made it hard to predict the outcome. For Zuma and his allies, the 2012 elective conference held at Mangaung represented his moment to seize control over the ANC. They hoped at the same time that Motlanthe would ‘wait his turn’ and remain as deputy president of the party.

On the other side there was a concerted effort to have ‘anyone but Zuma’ in the ANC’s leadership position and pressure was put on Motlanthe to go up against him. By early December 2012, just before the Mangaung conference, it was clear to Zuma’s foot soldiers that Motlanthe would not be inclined to ‘wait his turn’ and step aside. It was time to put into effect their Plan B.

Ramaphosa had already been approached earlier in the year by Zuma’s allies to discover whether he would be open to the idea of re-entering the leadership contest. At the time he was knee deep in dealing on behalf of the party with the disciplinary case of the firebrand Youth League leader Julius Malema, who was subsequently expelled from the ANC. Ramaphosa was flabbergasted at the suggestion that he could return to the ANC’s top leadership a decade and a half after he had left the position of secretary-general. Although he had remained on the ANC’s National Executive Committee, once he was overlooked for the deputy presidency in 1996 he devoted his life thereafter to successfully building his business empire.

By 2012 he was a billionaire, and if you asked any influential person in politics at the time, no one would have predicted that Ramaphosa would return to become deputy president and later president of the ANC and of the country. Even those who engineered his ascendancy to the ANC’s top six saw him as a placeholder with no real political clout to reach all the way to the top. It was a politics of convenience that was not meant to last.

Ramaphosa’s election to the position of deputy president of the ANC solidified the notion that leadership choices in the ANC are dictated from the top down and that branches are actually managed by the leaders at the helm of the party. This was evident throughout the Mangaung conference.

‘We were the ones that convinced Comrade Cyril that he should contest. We had to really convince him and explain to him that we had the numbers,’ Magashule said to me, thereby demonstrating the Zuma-era arrangement of leadership.

When Ramaphosa’s name began to find support with the ANC branches, he insisted both publicly and within the party that he would not challenge Motlanthe for the deputy presidency of the ANC. Ramaphosa believed that Motlanthe should not stand against Zuma for the ANC presidency but should instead remain, uncontested, as party deputy president. Zuma’s allies shared that sentiment too, saying that Motlanthe would upset a perfectly suitable political arrangement by challenging for the presidency.

I once asked Motlanthe about his decision to contest Zuma in 2012 without openly campaigning for the position and, as a result, to face the real prospect of failure. He argued that he could not turn down a request by ANC branches for him to contest the presidency. He wanted to change the culture of factionalism that was already deeply rooted in the party.

‘In 2012 I followed the procedures. I was not prepared to be part of any faction. However, I was prepared to stand on the strength of being nominated by branches even though it was clear that the conference itself was structured to achieve certain outcomes,’ he said to me in an interview in 2017. He knew his prospects of successfully challenging Zuma were slim, but he wanted to stand on the strength of principle.

When Zuma’s allies began ‘shopping’ for a deputy presidential candidate to include on their slate, they didn’t give serious consideration to the kind of the person he would be besides the need to have someone who would help in their efforts to defeat Motlanthe and the ‘anything but Zuma’ brigade that supported him. Anthony Butler summarised the situation aptly: ‘touting Cyril as deputy was probably intended to show Motlanthe that he could be easily replaced’.

When Zuma’s allies agreed that they would back Ramaphosa and include him on their slate, they were confident that they would be able to get their ‘ground forces’ to persuade delegates who were attending the conference to put their mark next to his name. Zweli Mkhize was then given the task of persuading Ramaphosa to accept the nomination for the deputy presidency.

Ramaphosa’s reticence reminded many of his contemporaries of the ANC’s first conference in 1991 after its unbanning, when he did not want to stand for the position of secretary-general of the ANC if he thought he might lose. He needed to be sure of his prospects before agreeing to put his hand up. Some people believe that Ramaphosa’s apprehension about putting his name forward again for the post of deputy stemmed from his fear of failure. He had already once been defeated in the contest for this position, when Thabo Mbeki was made deputy president even though Ramaphosa was Nelson Mandela’s preferred choice. ‘CR doesn’t like losing,’ a long-time friend said.

Ramaphosa’s close allies have revealed that he only seriously considered accepting the nomination after he had had a thorough discussion with Motlanthe, who was clear that he would not stand for re-election as ANC deputy president, even if his attempt at the presidency failed. In essence, Ramaphosa wanted Motlanthe’s blessing first before he made his bid.

The two met on 6 December 2012 at OR Tambo House, the official residence of the deputy president in Pretoria, where Ramaphosa asked Motlanthe for his thoughts. They had a long history of working together in the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) when Ramaphosa was general secretary and Motlanthe was employed as an education officer in the union after his release from Robben Island prison in 1987. Motlanthe then succeeded Ramaphosa as general secretary of NUM when Ramaphosa was elected secretary-general of the ANC.

At the meeting, Motlanthe laid out the reasons why he was going up against Zuma, citing principle. Although he effectively gave Ramaphosa his blessing, Motlanthe also warned him about what he was likely to get himself into as deputy to Zuma. By that time, there was so much bad blood between Motlanthe and Zuma that the two were barely on speaking terms, even in the Union Buildings. ‘Motlanthe could see that things were not going well under Zuma and he could not pretend as if everything was OK,’ said an old friend of both Ramaphosa and Motlanthe.

When Ramaphosa accepted the deputy presidency, he was aware of his own history with Zuma. Butler correctly points out that there was ‘no love lost between Zuma and Ramaphosa’ at the time.

Ramaphosa’s rise to the deputy presidency of the ANC was a real case of political convenience served with a good helping of Zuma-era slate politics. For Zuma, Ramaphosa was a political lightweight, having neither served the ANC in exile nor been imprisoned for his political convictions on Robben Island. His struggle credentials were, in Zuma’s eyes, therefore, non-existent and his role as one of the founding leaders of the NUM was treated with suspicion. There was a long history of mistrust between the two, who first came up against each other at the ANC’s Durban conference in 1991, when they both contested the position of secretary-general of the ANC. Ramaphosa won and Zuma became Ramaphosa’s deputy.

So why did Zuma and his allies decide to include him as their candidate as deputy president? Many of those involved in the discussions to bring Ramaphosa onto the Zuma slate have said that Zuma’s faction believed Ramaphosa was too politically weak ever to pose a formidable challenge to him. Which is why he made the perfect candidate.

At the same time, Motlanthe’s daring attempt to challenge Zuma after his first term as ANC president was seen as a nuisance and affront that upset a perfectly suitable existing political arrangement. The Zuma faction wanted to hit back and teach him a lesson.

This thinking was revealed and confirmed five years after the Mangaung conference when then ANC’s Mpumalanga strongman, David Mabuza, criticised Motlanthe, arguing that he should have stayed on as Zuma’s deputy instead of challenging him in 2012 for the top job. Mabuza told the Sunday Times in an interview that Motlanthe had created disorder within the ruling party when he challenged Zuma as the party’s leader in 2012 and ‘broke the ANC tradition’ by which a deputy president waited to succeed to high office after the incumbent president had served two terms. This was the argument raised at the Polokwane conference in 2007 when Zuma fought viciously with Thabo Mbeki, who was then standing for his third term as ANC president. Had Motlanthe waited his chance, Mabuza argued, there would not have been factional chaos in the ANC. ‘Yes, he [Motlanthe] created disorder. According to me, coming to this conference [the ANC elective congress at Nasrec in December 2017], it was going to be easy if Comrade Kgalema was there, we were going to proceed,’ Mabuza said.

There were other reasons too why Ramaphosa seemed to be a suitable candidate for the deputy presidency in 2012. To the Zuma camp, he appeared to have ‘the right amount of credibility and just the right amount of scandal’ for Zuma to obtain a tight grip on him. Ramaphosa would also come with support and legitimacy from the business community at a time when Zuma desperately needed to boost investor confidence in the South African economy. Moreover, he would appease the middle class and white voters, or so they believed. The Zuma group used Sihle Zikalala, the provincial secretary of the ANC in KZN at the time, as their mouthpiece to test this political experiment in the media. Zikalala said at the time that Ramaphosa would help the ANC relate better with business, intellectuals, and the youth. There was also the consideration that the election of Ramaphosa, a Venda from the far north of the country, would help provide ethnic balance in the party’s top leadership.

These factors along with the desperate need to defeat Motlanthe made Ramaphosa seem a likely deputy even despite the fact that Zuma had no respect for him. Zuma’s views of Ramaphosa had long been shaped by a political conspiracy theory that he had once been a ‘plant of the Boers’ and lacked the struggle credentials that Zuma laid claim to. ‘He was a mafikizolo [newcomer/lightweight] in the ANC … he just started yesterday,’ an ANC leader said, reflecting Zuma and his allies’ view of Ramaphosa. It was a sentiment that did not fade with time. Allegations were also made that Ramaphosa had been compromisingly close to whites during the negotiations between the ANC and the National Party for a political settlement and later for the drawing up of a new constitution.

When Ramaphosa eventually became ANC deputy president, there was a firm belief among Zuma’s allies that Zuma had a dossier on Ramaphosa that was so damning that if its contents were revealed it would expose him and end his political career. The secret ‘file’ was said to have details of Ramaphosa’s ties with the Americans and the ‘truth’ about how he had made his money. This, it was thought, could be used against Ramaphosa if he dared to challenge Zuma as president. Such a dossier proved to be a fallacy.

Lastly, Ramaphosa had been drawn into the controversy surrounding the killing by police of striking mine workers at Marikana, a mine belonging to the Lonmin group on whose board Ramaphosa sat as a non-executive director. Emails sent by Ramaphosa to the board encouraging a more effective response to the strikes were revealed at the Farlam commission of inquiry into the killings and seemed to depict Ramaphosa in a bad light. No doubt Ramaphosa’s consequent reputational damage was politically convenient for Zuma. As Anthony Butler has expressed it: ‘Zuma probably felt that Marikana left Cyril’s future in his hands.’

After an initial hesitation in December 2012, Ramaphosa eventually gave in to persuasion and accepted the candidacy for the position of deputy president of the ANC on the Zuma ticket. As a result he faced a contest with two of his political contemporaries, Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa, with whom he had been fingered in 2001 in a bogus plot to unseat President Thabo Mbeki. After ballots were cast, Ramaphosa received 3018 votes against Sexwale’s 463 and Phosa’s 470, and was duly elected deputy president of the ANC on Tuesday, 18 December 2012.

In a moment that marked a significant step in his political career, Ramaphosa went on stage amid loud cheers and hugged Zuma. He then lifted his hands with Mkhize, who had just been elected treasurer-general, on his right and Zuma on his left. Also on stage was ANC chairperson Baleka Mbete, Gwede Mantashe, who had been re-elected as party secretary-general, and Jessie Duarte, who also held her hands high after just being elected deputy secretary-general of the ANC.

Ramaphosa’s time in the shadows of political life was now over. His ambition to become the deputy president of the ANC was finally realised, although it was now as Zuma’s second-in-command, not Nelson Mandela’s.

As for Magashule, Mkhize and Zikalala, who were all part of the inner workings of the arrangement to resurrect Ramaphosa’s political career, they were satisfied that Motlanthe was now out of the picture and that Zuma was firmly in the driving seat once again. This victory in the 2012 ANC election race emboldened Zuma and his allies in a way that set them on the path of state capture. As they consolidated power within the ANC, the looting of public resources became rampant and the dismantling of the state was intensified.

For Ramaphosa, however, 2012 opened the way for Madiba’s ‘chosen one’ to become the deputy president of the country after a seventeen-year wait. It was the return of Mandela’s ‘prodigal son’.

In her analysis of the Mangaung conference, my colleague Ranjeni Munusamy wrote that Ramaphosa would face an uphill battle from the left in the ANC tripartite alliance. ‘Cosatu and the SACP supported Zuma’s re-election but did not want him to replace Motlanthe. They felt safe with Motlanthe but distrusted Ramaphosa, believing he has traded in his worker credentials and now represents the interests of business. The business sector and investor community, on the other hand, is ecstatic and relieved by Ramaphosa’s election as ANC deputy president, and the prospect of him replacing Zuma in the near future,’ she wrote at the time.

As it turned out, the people who opposed any suggestion in 2012 that Ramaphosa would serve at the behest of big business, later used that argument as a tool to discredit him in the race for the party presidency in 2017. It was Magashule who led the charge against ‘white monopoly capital’ in the run-up to the Nasrec conference, and he often took digs at Ramaphosa, claiming that he would further the interests of big business. On the other hand, it was the trade union federation Cosatu that was the first formal structure to endorse Ramaphosa for president in December 2016, a year before the Nasrec conference. All this proves that the workings of politics are hinged on fickle opportunism and convenience.

But when Ramaphosa entered the fray in 2017, he was far more insightful and more experienced than in earlier years and he knew just how to play the political game – and win.