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The Nasrec moment

I was a gutsy young journalist who had begged her way into a newsroom when I asked the newly elected deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa in 2013 whether he wanted to be president one day. I was at the time desperate to prove myself as a serious political journalist and naively thought that there was a chance that the new deputy president of the ANC would disclose his political ambitions to me.

‘Yes,’ he said in response, and my heart skipped a beat. In fact, my body clenched and my breath was definitely shorter. ‘Of my golfing club,’ he chuckled.

I tried to laugh but I was actually annoyed. To me, it was a simple yes or no answer. Do you want to be president? Yes or no?

Years later, when his ambition to become president became more pronounced, he played the same joke. He told a room full of journalists and politicians that he was hugely ambitious, so ambitious that he wanted to become the president of the Ankole Cattle Breeders Society.

In the ANC, I have come to learn, it’s deemed wrong to declare in public your political aspirations, but it’s seemingly OK to work relentlessly to have them realised. In essence, you can campaign to be president, but you just can’t say out loud that you want to be one. Ramaphosa wanted to be president. He was not an ambivalent candidate. He knew what he wanted.

I spoke to a number of his close confidants who said he would not have accepted the nomination to become deputy president without eyeing the presidency. But those who made him deputy president saw him as a mere placeholder.

When Ramaphosa became deputy president of the country, he tried in earnest to play down talk that he would be Zuma’s successor, famously telling CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that the issue of being president ‘doesn’t even arise’. But the matter did arise. In fact, Ace Magashule and David Mabuza first raised the issue with him around 2015, asking him whether he would be their candidate for the presidency at the next elective conference.

Ramaphosa’s response to them at the time was that it was too early to be talking about the succession to Zuma so soon into his second term as president. It is perplexing why Ramaphosa did not immediately jump onto that political train as it had a great prospect of success. Finally, towards the end of 2016, Ramaphosa used the ANC equivalent of saying ‘Yes, I want to be president’ by making it known that if the branches of the ANC nominated him for the ANC presidency, he would accept.

This immediately drew the ire of Zuma and his allies, who self-righteously preached that in the ANC people don’t announce publicly that they want to be president. David Mabuza was one who openly denounced Ramaphosa for this, though the latter’s supporters believed there was no better way of staking out a claim than by doing so. They realised that the ANC’s internal election systems had been corrupted and perverted by money and patronage, and that a Kgalema Motlanthe-style campaign of reluctance would not work.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the decision was made to set up a formal campaign structure outside the ANC whose task was to have Ramaphosa elected as party president. The general view is that his camp knew they had to outsmart and outwit the other side by all means necessary and, naturally, they would need a war chest of resources to get going. The aim of formalising the campaign, I was told, was to ensure there was some method to the madness of campaigning. And when people were asked to donate money, there were checks and balances in place. Again, this was alien to popular ANC culture.

The CR17 campaign was at first just a group of Ramaphosa’s friends. Prominent among them was James Motlatsi, his long-time friend and co-founder of the National Union of Mineworkers. The two had later ventured into business together. Another member of the group was Bejani Chauke, the silent fixer who had served as an adviser to North West premier Thandi Modise. Donné Nicol was the person who was seen as closest to Ramaphosa; she was his long-time assistant in the ANC who went along with him into business and became the chief executive officer of the Cyril Ramaphosa Foundation.

The trio got together and decided that Ramaphosa could not rely only on his supporters within the ANC and needed a vehicle which would be set up to formally campaign for him. They took the unprecedented decision to create a formal campaign office almost as if Ramaphosa was a candidate in a US-style primary.

If it had been the primaries, he would have relied on a Super Pac (political action committee) to raise funds and pool together resources. But campaigning for the ANC is banned, believe it or not. The party, somewhat hypocritically, preaches that branch delegates are the only ones who elect leaders. They are meant to use the almost biblical ‘Through the Eye of the Needle’ ANC document from the early 2000s to scrutinise and choose the type of leaders they want.

There is always a disingenuous game played, where leaders claim party elections really represent ‘the will of the people’ while actually they are often engineered by political fixers who make things happen. Often, if branch leaders have aligned themselves with a certain faction, any attempt to oppose their decisions will be met with disruption or violence. If branch leaders fear that the majority would support a leader to whom they are not personally aligned, a branch meeting can be abandoned midway so that no binding decision takes place. The next day or soon afterwards, a meeting is called without the opposing side knowing about it, and very quickly a decision is taken to support the candidate of choice of the branch leadership.

This is how gatekeeping and membership manipulation take place and as a result it becomes easy to ‘buy a branch’. Before Nasrec, there were talks that the ‘cost’ of a branch nomination was between R5000 and R10,000. Such a way of operating calls the true democracy of the ANC into question, and veterans like Kgalema Motlanthe are pessimistic about this system ever ending. But money politics are too far gone in the ANC, and with Ramaphosa it was a case of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’.

When Ramaphosa gave the nod and publicly accepted nomination, he did not want to lose. He had been the victim of ANC internal politicking once before when Thabo Mbeki was chosen as deputy president, and he refused to go through that again. Those who supported him believed they had learned important lessons from the Motlanthe campaign in 2012 and knew that the only way to outwit Zuma and his allies was to beat them at their own game. It was all about groundwork and co-ordination, ensuring that Ramaphosa’s name was sufficiently prominent at a branch level and that his support was solidified.

The CR17 campaign was split into two committees, the fundraising and logistics committee, and the political committee. James Motlatsi, Donné Nicol and Bejani Chauke headed up the fundraising side of things while deputy minister of health and ANC veteran Joe Phaahla headed up the political side. Two of Zuma’s former allies from KwaZulu-Natal, Bheki Cele and Senzo Mchunu, also played a formidable role in the campaign along with Jackson Mthembu and Aaron Motsoaledi. The political committee had to ensure Ramaphosa was given platforms on which to speak and that ANC branches discussed his name as a serious candidate for the ANC presidency.

Ramaphosa had mostly the support of the Limpopo province, led by the chairperson and premier Stanley Mathabatha, and that of Gauteng. But to get the support of Eastern Cape and Northern Cape, two local leadership races had to go his way. In the Eastern Cape Oscar Mabuyane’s win was as important as Zamani Saul’s in the Northern Cape.

The real stakes of these provincial conferences were fully revealed when the Eastern Cape conference descended into bloody chaos. Ramaphosa himself notably described that conference as a ‘festival of chairs’ in reference to the chairs that were violently thrown by and at delegates. The conference in the Eastern Cape was the clearest indication that the CR17 team was willing to go the full mile to ensure their victory. They knew that ANC national conferences are won and lost ‘on the ground’, and winning a key province like the Eastern Cape was pivotal in ensuring that Ramaphosa would have a real chance.

The machinery of the CR17 campaign was on full display during the Eastern Cape conference. For one thing, Mabuyane and his supporters were dressed in a style similar to that of the CR17 team; delegates were well looked after; and money definitely exchanged hands. Organisers who worked on the campaign would have you believe that money was not used to bribe delegates to support Ramaphosa but merely to ‘take care of them’.

At the national conference, the Western Cape delegates were paid the equivalent of what they had lost in wages by spending a week in Johannesburg for the conference’s duration. Representatives from all nine provinces who were registered as ‘CR delegates’ were given accommodation in special hotels away from those paid for officially by the ANC. This was in an effort to ensure that the campaign team could always keep count of how many votes Ramaphosa would get. It was also to prevent their delegates from falling victim to solicitation by the other side.

Some delegates had hopped on buses with just the clothes on their backs, and the campaign had to fork out money to buy the basic necessities for them. Paying for separate hotels meant also paying for food and transport for delegates and ensuring that they were satisfied with the treatment they received. From the outside, it looked and smelled like bribery. But to Ramaphosa campaigners it was the nature of the beast. The other side, they claimed, was using state resources and the state apparatus in their favour. They could not sit back helplessly.

As much as the CR17 campaign tried to centralise all campaigning efforts to ensure nothing could become the subject of criticism for use by the opposition against them, unofficial and dubious activities crept in. This meant that money spent was sometimes unaccounted for and the campaign did not get real value for their buck. People would ask for money on the pretence that they were organising an event in a remote area of the North West, for instance, only to disappear with the cash.

But because campaigning in the ANC exists under a cloud of such secrecy, false pretences and disingenuousness, it is hard to manage and keep things in order. This is probably why, by their own admission even after their victory at the conference, the CR17 campaign committed a litany of mistakes.

Motlatsi, who was at the centre of the campaign, said the foremost error was allowing just about anybody into the political committee. This meant that there were people right at the heart of the campaign who were only there because they were not wanted by the other side. As a result, a number of decisions taken were not made solely in Ramaphosa’s interest.

Then there was the impression created that Ramaphosa’s campaign was run and managed by white people, reinforcing rumour and speculation that Ramaphosa was simply a front for the political interests of white people. Even those who supported him were upset that the campaign logistics were organised by Donné Nicol and former MK soldier Marion Sparg. This perpetuated the widespread notion that Ramaphosa was but a proxy of white people and of white monopoly capital.

Elective conferences are often a time for political fixers and runners to make money. What is referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as the ‘conference economy’ involves fixers buying expensive cars or campaigners using campaign resources to pay off their houses. In the CR17 campaign, systems were created to avoid these temptations. Donné Nicol would ask for slips as proof of payment and would request people’s bank account numbers to reimburse them for expenses rather than paying them in cash.

Another mistake of the CR17 campaign was to focus entirely on Ramaphosa’s election as president and not to give any thought to the other leaders who would form part of his presidential team. In other words, they ought to have formalised a list of those who would clearly feature on Ramaphosa’s election slate and a list of preferred candidates for the eighty-member ANC National Executive Committee.

Besides Mantashe coming out to contest the position of ANC chairperson and Senzo Mchunu that of secretary-general, other senior positions were less clearly earmarked. Some attributed this neglect to the fact that Ramaphosa did not want a leadership slate, but the more plausible explanation is that within the campaign there was stiff competition for positions. The position of deputy president was the most complex one to navigate for this group.

In addition to Ramaphosa running against Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, there were five other candidates who threw their names into the hat. This complicated matters as two other senior top six leaders at the time wanted to be president: then ANC national chairperson Baleka Mbete and treasurer-general Zweli Mkhize were both campaigning for that position. Long-serving ministers Jeff Radebe and Lindiwe Sisulu also put their names forward alongside that of Mathews Phosa for the ANC presidency.

While there was a lot of noise about the number of candidates competing for the ANC presidency, as they tried to secure branch nominations, Dlamini-Zuma and Ramaphosa were the clear forerunners. Mbete’s campaign began in earnest but there were soon signs that it was going nowhere. The same was true for Radebe’s and Phosa’s prospects. Mkhize’s presidential aspirations were pinned on the efforts of David Mabuza and Paul Mashatile to create a ‘unity’ card that would effectively play both sides, and for some time his campaign seemed to be formidable.

Sisulu’s ‘it’s a must’ campaign also got some traction although not as much as was expected. She was made to believe by the political fixers around her that she had a real chance at securing the ANC presidency. This is why when she was approached by the CR17 campaign to stand on their slate as deputy president, she rebuffed them arrogantly. Not only did she refuse, but she also said Ramaphosa ought to be her deputy. This was a reassertion of the view that Ramaphosa was politically junior to those ANC leaders who had been in exile or who had served a prison sentence on Robben Island. When talks broke down with Sisulu, Mkhize hoped to be considered as deputy president, but that didn’t quite work out either.

Ramaphosa’s main rival was Dlamini-Zuma. She was supported by the ANC’s Women’s League, who used gender as their main campaign tool. Her candidacy was supported by the widespread belief that it was time that the ANC was led by a woman. To compete against this, Ramaphosa and those close to him felt that the only way they could confront the gender question was to have a woman deputy president on their leadership slate. This led to an eleventh-hour search for a suitable candidate, who emerged in the person of Naledi Pandor. She was a respected woman in the ANC and a hard-working minister. But the only snag was that she did not have a strong constituency within the ANC.

A decision was then taken among the senior members of the campaign team that Ramaphosa would formally and publicly endorse Pandor in an effort to send a message to his supporters in branches right across the country. This move was to backfire spectacularly. With a month before the Nasrec conference in December 2017, Ramaphosa decided to announce his slate openly – a decision that has since been described as foolish. He stood on stage in Sekhukhuneland in Limpopo and declared who his running mates would be. He was as clear as ever: ‘Support Comrade Naledi Pandor for deputy president,’ he said. He also told his supporters at the rally that they should vote for former KwaZulu-Natal ANC chairperson Senzo Mchunu as secretary-general and then secretary-general Gwede Mantashe for national chairperson. Paul Mashatile was the candidate for the position of treasurer-general.

When Ramaphosa made this announcement, he knew that Mantashe, who was in charge of running the ANC, would have to denounce what he had done. Ironically, the person who was part of the inner circle of the CR17 campaign had now to condemn Ramaphosa. This was done by way of a statement issued a day later. ‘The ANC … calls on all its leaders and members to desist from the practice of pronouncing on and circulating slates which may be seen to undermine the branches’ inalienable right to select candidates best placed to implement the national democratic revolution,’ the ANC officially declared.

Ramaphosa, who was obviously peeved by the tone of the statement, decided to release his own one in response. ‘The names I mentioned for leadership positions arose from interactions and nominations emerging from ANC structures and should be understood in that context. This, however, does not detract from the importance of, at all times, reaffirming the centrality of the role of branch members as the electoral college for all elective positions in the ANC. The views I expressed are by no means prescriptive and do not displace the right of branches to nominate their preferred candidates for any position of ANC leadership,’ Ramaphosa said.

Ramaphosa’s endorsement of Pandor surprised some ANC leaders who supported him because they believed she was not vocal enough in calling for Zuma to resign. Ranjeni Munusamy opined at the time that Pandor’s inclusion on Ramaphosa’s slate was probably part of a long game, as she would command respect during the 2019 national election campaign. But Pandor’s lack of a constituency in the ANC resulted in her not getting enough support for the deputy presidency.

There was some talk of Ramaphosa courting Zweli Mkhize, but he too became the victim of a deal brokered by David Mabuza and was forced to withdraw his candidacy for deputy president. There was similar confusion around the position of deputy secretary-general within the Ramaphosa camp. But in the end, it was Ramaphosa up against Dlamini-Zuma for president, Lindiwe Sisulu against David Mabuza for deputy president, Gwede Mantashe against Nathi Mthethwa for chairperson, Senzo Mchunu against Ace Magashule for secretary-general, Zingiswa Losi (who hailed from Cosatu) against Jessie Duarte for deputy secretary-general, and Paul Mashatile against Maite Nkoana-Mashabane for treasurer-general.

By the time the conference began, the outcome was too close to call. Both sides had fought for their very survival and had the wounds to show. No amount of deal-making and political horse-trading along the way prepared either side for the result. In the end, although Ramaphosa won the presidency, he did not win the ANC. Instead a leadership collective was elected as the culmination of factional warfare, and Ramaphosa’s victory over Dlamini-Zuma (by a margin of 179 votes) was greeted more with trepidation than elation.