It is not hard to understand why ANC members dream of a
future defined by a commitment to its policies rather than personalities that
lead or should lead it. As the succession battles continue to grow, and as
extreme incidents of factionalism become more frequent and harmful, the current
efforts to move beyond viewing the ANC as a conduit to state revenue-related
largesse appear woefully inadequate. Adding to the frustration, the battles for
the soul of the ANC are alive and well—and as fraught as ever. South Africa is
in the throes of a full-fledged leadership crisis, person-in-front or
institutional, with an economy that faces one of its most difficult challenges
of recovery. Party stalwarts and die-hards are starting to question the
suitability or otherwise of the current leadership to take on the challenge,
whence it is not uncommon to find nomenclature to the effect that ‘the tribe
must die, for the nation to thrive’ from amongst its trusted cognitive elite.
In fact, a former Deputy President is on record to have answered a BBC
interview question, if it would be good for the ANC to lose power, he said: “it
would be good for the ANC itself and let me tell you why – because those
elements who are in it for the largesse will quit it, will desert it and only
then would the possibility arise for salvaging whatever is left of it,”.

Proponents of clean government hope (and sometimes promise)
that in addition to mitigating ANC-as-governing party decay, the transition to
a state capture immune and corruption-free South Africa will help make tensions
over the political economy and a state-based economy a thing of the past. It is
true that a corruption-free South Africa will transform its socio-economic woes,
just not necessarily in the ways many of its champions want and/or expect. The
transition to a less corrupt state affairs management system will
reconfigure how the investment community, foreign and domestic, sees the country
as an investment destination. Despite their chronic reluctance to vote with
their investment in favor of a market-friendly ANC leadership such as the
Ramaphosa one is, the many fronts that South Africa’s growth prospects have to
contend with have increased the person-in-front demands on the Ramaphosa
chapter of ANC leadership in ways that any conception of a viable social
compact will be impossible to conclude unless the person-in-front is acceptable
and/or approved by private capital. The public might henceforth be a conduit of
endorsing private sector and economic establishment wishes on who ultimately
becomes the person-in-front face of South Africa, the era of institutional
importance of political coalitions might be passing, and parties will be
shortlisting mechanisms for the powerful to select who they want, prefer,
and/or approve.

The process of consolidating the leadership function to meet
the demands of the economy will, especially in an in-ANC elections
contestation year, be messy at best. And far from fostering comity and
cooperation, the contest for ANC Presidency will most likely produce new forms
of competition and confrontation long before a new, more capable leadership
cohort takes shape. The rudest of lessons a Ramaphosa presidency has learned or still learning is how to advance a rebuilding and renewal program of the
ANC by tackling the biggest of elephants in the proverbial ANC NEC room,
corruption. With practically almost all members of the NEC is either a
subject or object of the ongoing anti-corruption investigations, including
being mentioned at various hypotheses, the required political support to his
program is at best a political egg dance with risks of a one-term presidency
notwithstanding an incomplete agenda still to be achieved.

Ramaphosa’s leadership is thus overstretched, with a
national mandate to govern that is increasingly proving to be out of balance
with the muted, and significantly large, tones of disapproval to his truncation
of ‘it is our turn to eat’ tendencies that define the ‘purpose of being in
politics’ vocational aspirations of many an in-ANC politician involved. The
many ‘opened files’ for investigation on Ramaphosa’s deputy, and many others in
the NEC, PEC, REC, and BECs are evidence of close proximity battles he has to
manage as he also handles the intricate state affairs. Part of the rot he has
pegged his legacy to deal with is resident in some of the key individuals he
might have to rely upon to clean the very rot, a leadership conundrum of ethics
case study proportions. The murmurings of somewhat ‘compromised’ by allegations
of corruption, though not proven true or otherwise, members of the ANC emerging
as regional and provincial big wigs compounds the weakening in-ANC political
capital he requires to pull through the tumultuous 2022 in-ANC Elective
Conferences year. The political and social capital he has to build a
reputational capital for the ANC and South Africa to the global ethical
community might well be the same capital those in the opposite direction are
reliant upon to build a ‘gangster state’, a delicate balance for an
overstretched President. In closing the 2022 NEC meeting, 

President Ramaphosa
was undoubtedly right when he said, “the lekgotla also took
time to discuss the issue of defending the gains of our democracy. It recognized
our movement is going through a period of decay and degeneration … divisions
and factions in the ANC are themselves a threat to our democracy. Regression of
ethical and moral leadership has resulted in what I would call a crisis. Our
credibility and legitimacy are being undermined by our inability to act”. Second from the letter, he wrote to ANC members where
Ramaphosa wrote, “… as a movement we have so
far been unable to turn our organizational positions into actions that will end
corruption once and for all. As a result, we have allowed corruption to
continue and, at times, to flourish within our ranks … we cannot as the ANC
rightfully call ourselves leaders of society if we fail to lead the people in
eradicating corruption from our own ranks. We cannot hope to win back people’s
trust if we continue to allow cadres who are charged with criminal conduct for
corruption to occupy positions of responsibility within government and our
movement,” the ANC President has drawn a definite line, if crossed by
anyone, including himself, will define leadership credibility beyond the rubric
of politicking.

The in-ANC ethical and moral leadership challenge
undoubtedly overshadows the many other service delivery exigencies that his
presidency is yet to deal with. The contest by many who are powerful to weaken
the possibility of being defined as representing a corrupt alternative because
they might have in one way or another, including by association with those
accused of corruption and its adjunct state capture, has demanded more to the
leadership resources Ramaphosa might have applied to return the country to its
economic growth glory days and thus overstretching him. Whilst his leadership
has made significant strides in energy security reform and transformation,
including dovetailing into the controversial global climate change-induced
energy mix policy architecture, his efforts are second-guessed from the extent
to which these impact on ‘fortunes of his comrades and on the other hand his
erstwhile business partners. Despite the technical dissociation from his
interests, and compliant with corporate governance protocols, regulatory or King
type volunteered one, the rule of law understanding deficit within the majority
of his political constituency might not be anchoring the ethical path he has
chosen, because his interests are always associated with him and thus he gets
the paint off him dealing with ‘others’ and not ‘others’.  

Having led the institutionalization of an in-ANC integrity
management mechanism where the step aside rules as a protective wall within
which the fragile reputation of the movement could be curated, his efforts are
weighed down by a maze of sophisticated in-organs of state network of officials
that are either compromised or compromising in relation to his battle to renew
society onto a better ethical pathway. The integrity committee process that the
ANC had adopted at its Mangaung Conference, incidentally where Ramaphosa was officially
installed as a potential heir apparent, remains one of the ‘putting the organization
into disrepute’ management tools and disciplinary process to manage party big
wigs without collapsing the party itself. Its promotion of self-volunteering
information to a ‘trusted’ in-ANC ‘safe’ space, positions the integrity of and
to the organization higher than the individual who is the subject. Yes, like
any human-dependent construct the integrity management system cannot escape the
influence of political interests of those steering the process, but with time
and maturity, including an organic development of its own interests, the
integrity management mechanism through the integrity committees will overtime
mature into a potent trusted system. In the meanwhile, it might have its
unfortunate casualties, who have the country’s courts as solace. It is the
consolidation of this integrity-building gain and its opposition, including
undermining by sections of the organization that have overstretched the
leadership resource the president may potentially be.

The growing societal discontent at how Ramaphosa’s
administration is handling the explosive issue of immigration control is a
front that is not free from the compromises that corruption imposed on the
capability of the state to deal with this matter. The quick to label as
xenophobia posture by a now well organized, resourced, and an entrenched
contingent of foreign national civil society complex, has not only made South
Africa’s response to this matter a fragile aspect of its international relations
strategic thrust but defined it as being conditional to its capability to
trade in the continent. On this front, both the capability of the state and
that of its immediate bordering nations have exponentially increased the
problem to levels where calls for a borderless Africa a fast becoming a recipe
towards a failed state.

The COVID19 pandemic is another from which a Ramaphosa
Presidency had to contend. Whilst other democracies saw it as a growth
stimulus opportunity, South Africa seems to have seen it as a ‘national
emergency or an opportunity for a ‘new turn to eat’. Progressive public policy
dictates that successful economies have been able to define new growth paths
through making exigencies of disaster opportunities for innovation and budget reprioritizations
to start a disaster-led growth trajectory, on this front Ramaphosa was again
either distracted or caught wanting. The incapacity of our manufacturing
sector, as well as the regulatory environment, to respond to new demands of
PPEs have facilitated imported goods-led spending on COVID19 related SMME
growth prospects.

The lockdown strategy as a public health response to the
pandemic, and legitimate under the circumstances, precipitated the collapse of
government systems that sustained and protected an already fragile and
collapsing public infrastructure whose cost of rejuvenation requires a
pre-world cup breed of decisive leadership, albeit without its corruption-prone
mandarins. The collapsed public infrastructure, which is now a Ramaphosa
presidential term crisis, notwithstanding its relations with decisions of past
administrations that he was part of, has generated further service delivery
crises that are now consuming his attention and are leaving long term legacies,
strategic and operational, that might likely spread South Africa’s fragility
into beneficiary sectors reliant on the infrastructure.

WHAT NEXT

Facing leadership of the ANC
would have always been a daunting task for any leader that could have followed
Jacob Zuma, given the bar set by discontents, manufactured or real, created by
the 5th Administration. The challenge of reuniting the ANC after any
National Elective Conference will now have to be one of the conditions given to any of its future leaders, especially the person-in-front. With 2022 being
an election year, Ramaphosa has an added challenge of fighting yet another
battle to secure himself first as ANC leader, and then work with and through
it, to convince an already disenchanted voter population which fire a definite
warning bullet in November1, 2021. Facing an in-ANC election does not seem to be
an issue for Ramaphosa given the limited number, and gravitas of contending
candidates, if popularity and other surveyed data are anything to go by.

The ANC Front would require a
strategic shift towards attracting in real terms a younger cohort of NEC
Candidates for his NEC. It would in fact be in his good stead if he would
create a top six of all under 55 young leaders, and more biased to under ’50s.
The generational mix should not be a requirement to the engine of the ANC but
may be a consideration in the packaging of the NEC. The growing need for
attending to the regional representation of all South Africans in the NEC is
what Ramaphosa can start institutionalizing in order to diffuse undue
concentration of regions based on skewed and often questionable membership
numbers. If the District Development Model logic is what defines a Ramaphosa
administrative approach to governance and thus leadership model, the capability
of the state might have to be spatial in all respects, including general
representation at centers of political power. It is true that South Africa has
in spirit gone federal, and yet chocked by a centralist nostalgia-driven by a
fear of some rich regions developing into cessationist nests exploitable by the
omnipresent risk of ethnic and tribal rigidities already mesmerizing the ANC itself,
albeit being in denial.

The 52 regions of the ANC
should be represented in its NEC, which would ensure that at any given moment
the NEC will be in touch with regional issues, in that way the party would be institutionalized
as a national voice. Consideration would also have to be made that at any
given material time, Parliament should also have such a representation,
division of revenue, and all other such-like legislations would gradually attune
to the spatial demands of development. A Ramaphosa ANC Presidency can then
structure the NEC to be institutionally representative of the 52 Regions, 9
Provinces, and thereafter a criterion to include others could be devised. The 61
NEC Members that represent regions and provinces should be remunerated to a
level where going into Parliament is careerist driven.

In this way, the various
fronts that any future leader, including maybe Ramaphosa himself during the
second term, will have to fight and or neutralize will be on a nodal point
basis. If the pattern is repeated in respect of provincial structures, and
regions, the ANC will be anchored on to its constituencies both as a structural
necessity and a leadership function. The design would limit the possibility of
weakness at the periphery, for it definitely breeds weakness at the center. The
pivot of leadership influence will have a spatial character and will define
allegiances to the service delivery objective as a driver of political power
aggrandizement. In making these choices Ramaphosa would be making it clear that
centralized political is not only what matters in building a democracy out of a
conflict-prone society, but the soft power of systems and structure overlayed
on a potent strategic thrust is an arbiter to conflicting interests of society.

In general, highly centralized
democracies, without a decentralist posture to community interests and aspirations,
become overstretched and eventually have to face the difficult choices of
having to deal with mismatches of commitments and capabilities, and this we
have seen in how the ANC-as-governing-party failed to structurally follow
through on its otherwise grandiose, and yet hollow political promises. The
rivals to the ANC’s political power, including rivals to any of its leaders,
have its structural weaknesses to reach out to its most needy constituencies as
problems it can weaponize to effect whatever change is necessary.  Ramaphosa might need to skirt these dilemmas
by managing the representativity issue thereby bringing the entire periphery to
the attention of all centers, especially the legislative and executive center. Eventually,
the federal spirit disguised as which regions are kingmakers, which provinces
are stronger, and many other regional rigidity dependent criteria, will punish
any leader that allows the strategic representation deficit of the periphery to
grow big enough for exploitation by regional parties, the KZN clawback of the
IFP, the urban penetration of liberalism driven political parties such as the
DA and Actions, and the pseudo-urban-rural fringe consolidation of an at-the-periphery
youth vote of the EFF, as well as the in-ANC rural potential to be perpetual
kingmakers is a case in point. CUT!!!