Balance of Power. Qaanitah Hunter
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