Ramaphosa's Turn. Ralph Mathekga
shunned Dlamini-Zuma’s candidature. Perhaps what it boils down to in the end is that Mabuza opposes the Gupta monopoly on corruption.
The result of the Nasrec battle reveals the complexity of the contradicting agendas that have seized control of the party. Beyond the factions, there are powerful and dangerous interests groups that have gained the upper hand in the ANC. Interest groups are more focused than factions, and they can exist across factions. They are also very adaptable. Furthermore, the politics of interest groups can be more damaging to democracy than haphazard factions. The question that is important to address is how the ANC as a party will proceed in addressing the priorities such as poverty and unemployment, given the proliferation of special interest and factionalism within the party.
Looking at the battle of Nasrec, we should ask how the ANC will carry on in its attempt to consolidate power and avoid losing the 2019 elections. What does Nasrec say about the need for the party to be firm and resolute against corruption? What does Nasrec signify for the policy directions that will be taken by the ANC in the future, and how will opposition parties respond to all this? Ramaphosa’s presidency will have to deal with the interest group politics that have emerged from Nasrec. This is a difficult battle. But with his history of straddling different groups and navigating his way through competing interests, perhaps Ramaphosa will demonstrate his prowess as he steers the party into the future.
2.
The Real Cyril Ramaphosa
Cyril Ramaphosa has had an enormously impressive and varied experience of public leadership. As someone who has come through the radical student movement that emphasised the plight of black students under apartheid; served within the trade union movement and facilitated its links with the broader social movement; searched for and found consensus during South Africa’s negotiations for democracy; built a relationship with the business community; and then quietly returned to politics, ending up as deputy president and then president of the country, Ramaphosa has truly seen it all. With all this experience under his belt, Ramaphosa may be the most well-equipped and capable leader to run the ANC and the country in the post-apartheid era.
After matriculating from Mphaphuli High School, which produced the leading students in what was then the homeland of Venda (now part of Limpopo province), Ramaphosa attended what was then called the University of the North (or Turfloop) to study law. Here he became involved in the student movement, both the Student Christian Movement and Black Consciousness. Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, who has worked with Ramaphosa in the National Planning Commission, says of him, “Cyril is SASO.” The South African Students Organisation, founded in the late 1960s by Steve Biko and other proponents of Black Consciousness, became the embodiment of intellectual self-determination among black students who wanted to play a decisive role in the struggle against apartheid. According to Biko,11 Black Consciousness was a way to ground the anti-apartheid movement in the lived experience of black students. It was an affirmation of black identity as a tool to contest the political, social, economic and cultural subjugation of black people. Here within SASO Ramaphosa cut his teeth as a leader.
After completing his studies, Ramaphosa began work in the trade union movement, and in 1982 helped found the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM),12 whose first secretary he became. NUM developed into a powerful union in the mining sector and became an indomitable anti-apartheid force on the labour front. In the fight against apartheid, economic disruptions in the form of labour strikes inflicted serious harm on the system, and helped turn the captains of industry and the economic establishment against the National Party and the system of apartheid.
NUM and Ramaphosa were subsequently instrumental in the formation of the trade union federation COSATU, which was launched in December 1985 and whose general secretary Ramaphosa became.13 The mining sector, which had been built up historically on the back of the exploitative migrant labour system, would provide a good arena for COSATU to link labour practices in South Africa with the broader struggle for social justice. COSATU was not an ordinary union focused only on the narrow shopfloor interests of workers; it built solidarity with other social movements outside the labour sector such as civil society, the churches, political organisations and student movements. COSATU’s strength was its mass appeal: under Ramaphosa’s leadership, union membership grew from 6,000 in 1982 to 300,000 in 1992, giving it control of nearly half of the total black workforce in the South African mining industry. Some trade union historians speak of COSATU as an example of “mass movement trade unionism”,14 and correctly so. This is the reason why most of those who led COSATU were also linked to the broader grassroots movement against apartheid, represented nationally by the United Democratic Front (UDF). It was through the mass anti-apartheid movement that Ramaphosa emerged as a leader on the national stage.
The UDF, formed in Cape Town in 1983, was an umbrella organisation drawing together hundreds of youth movements, community organisations, trade unions, professional bodies and church groups throughout the country. When both the UDF and COSATU came under increasing government restrictions in the late 1980s, the two came together to cooperate in a loose alliance called the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM), in which Ramaphosa took a leading role. Ramaphosa’s own story needs to be understood within the context of the “grassroots coalition”15 that resulted in mass resistance against the apartheid system. If Ramaphosa’s ascent to power as president of the ANC and of the country is an indication of a shift in leadership approach, the politics of the UDF and MDM offer a good starting point for understanding what this shift might entail. It is from this vantage point that Ramaphosa’s leadership style should be understood.
Led organically by a group of local activists within the country, the UDF/MDM produced a breed of leaders who navigated between the ANC’s Marxist revolutionary politics and the practical limitations of operating within the country under an oppressive system. Historians agree that the UDF was “an amalgam of rather diverse organisations over which the central leadership exerted only a loose control”.16 Mass movements that operate outside a formal institutional framework tend to be loosely organised and lack a centralised leadership and system of command. Unlike political parties, they often do not subscribe to a hierarchical structure. The UDF displayed a democratic culture typical of mass movements, demonstrating a haphazard organisational life and lack of coordinated leadership. The leadership style of the UDF was dominated by the notion of collective leadership, very unlike the ANC’s idea of democratic centralism. All in all, the UDF produced a breed of leaders with a distinct culture of leadership that was shaped by the immediate circumstances under which the movement then existed. It is within this context that Ramaphosa’s leadership style developed.
Judged in terms of a hierarchical pattern of leadership, with systematic and clearly defined flows of power from leaders to members, the UDF did not fare well. From the bureaucratic point of view, it was poorly constituted. But when it came to its ability to inspire the masses to take political action, the UDF was exceptionally effective in undermining the apartheid system. It was because of the success of the UDF’s internal resistance that the apartheid government lost the capacity to control the country in the eyes of the international community and its own followers.17 As a result of the disruptions caused by the UDF, it became difficult for the apartheid government to assure the regime’s increasingly jittery allies that the situation in South Africa was in hand. For those who sympathised with the UDF, on the other hand, the formation raised the hope that apartheid could be defeated without violence – by the staging of public protests and labour stay-aways. These were the manoeuvres that exposed the hollowness of the regime’s PR campaign and undermined the piecemeal reforms that the regime sought to undertake to defuse tensions in the country.
Today there are many prominent leaders in South Africa with roots in the UDF. They are currently found throughout the population: in churches, the business sector, civil society, universities, government, trade unions and political parties alike. When the ANC was unbanned in 1990 and the democratic transition began in the country, most of the UDF leaders invoked their membership of the ANC. On their return to South Africa, the formerly exiled leaders of the ANC displaced the local UDF leaders and ensured that their own people would take centre stage in the political leadership of the country. It would also mean that the party would practise a type