On Friday, as Cyril Ramaphosa finished his first address as president of SA, the state of the nation was different. It was not only that the dignity and decorum of the event had been restored. Nor was it that, after many years of abuse, SA now had a president with the commitment to methodically plot out the priorities of an investor-friendly government. And although the atmosphere as people streamed out of the National Assembly was one of elation, it was more than the mood that had changed.
The political ground had shifted; on the terrain on which political parties play, new opportunities had been born and old ones had vanished.
Ramaphosa’s primary aim is to lead an economic recovery. We know this from his speech and from the pieces he has written prior to his election. His vision is the National Development Plan, within which he has elevated an apex priority: to deal with the crisis of youth unemployment destroying communities and which, if not remedied, will ultimately destroy SA.
He showed that his modus operandi will be his familiar slow and steady approach. The array of teams and processes and summits he plans will set in motion a comprehensive round of social compacting.
There is much to write about and say about all of these things. But the biggest political impact of Friday night’s speech was not the plans and proposals but that the ANC had been hauled out of the abyss and given a new lease on life.
Predictably, the opposition sniped. Even though EFF leader Julius Malema applauded during the speech with feeling, afterwards he reflected that it was all "fluff" and a case of telling people what they wanted to hear.
The DA’s Mmusi Maimane and John Steenhuisen did their best to remind us that the ANC remained SA’s biggest problem. It was only Western Cape premier Helen Zille who had the good grace to be honest: it was a good speech, she said, because it united South Africans.
The speech was a striking commitment to nonracialism.
In the opening few minutes Ramaphosa switched to Afrikaans to say that "we are building a country where a person’s prospects are determined by their own initiative and hard work, and not by the colour of their skin, place of birth, gender, language or income of their parents." While the pledge would appeal to anyone disadvantaged by the structure of our society, it was strongly reminiscent of the Mandela days and was the first explicit attempt by the ANC to reach out to whites for a long time.
The philosophy of non-racialism came from the struggles of the 1950s, in which the solidarity of minority race groups with Africans was small but powerful enough to influence an entire generation of African leaders. It meant that African nationalism in SA took a unique and unusual historical turn, quite distinct from the black power movement internationally, and to nationalism in the rest of the continent.
Nonracialism was integrally linked to Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada and Walter Sisulu, and went on to define the structure and principles of the internal movement.
In the external movement, nonracialism had more of a contradictory status. Because of the tendency of minorities to dominate leadership positions an explicit position was taken on the importance of African leadership, and it was decided that key positions in the ANC had to be held by Africans.
After the Mandela government ended, it was Thabo Mbeki who, with his "I am an African" speech and his project to build a black middle class as well as build relationships and influence in Africa, began the shift to a more Africanist ANC.
While transformation of the economy was, after some resistance, accepted by business — certainly not by the white community at large — as essential, black economic empowerment also unleashed a set of dynamics that were impossible to control. Crony groupings of business people began to attach themselves to the state, using race and politics as leverage to access state resources.
And under the Jacob Zuma years, in which systemic corruption and patronage flourished, the ANC moved into decline and descended into an increasingly poisonous racial politics. The crony groups did not become significantly rich, the super-rich elite were born in the first round of empowerment led by Mbeki, but they did become significantly powerful.
Ironically, despite their best efforts to feed off the state, it was a family of immigrant Indians, the Guptas, who ran the game in the end and to which all in the end were subservient.
The high point of this was the crudely exaggerated narrative that SA was controlled by a conspiracy of white monopoly capital. While Bell Pottinger put out the messaging at first, it was clear that at the height of the fight for control of the ANC it had been Zuma’s intent to crystallise the accompanying call for radical economic transformation into an ANC ideology.
The increased volume of racial nationalism inside the ANC did not happen in isolation from what was occurring in opposition politics. At the time that Mbeki very consciously asserted that he was an African, then DA leader Tony Leon was "Fighting Back". The strategy was enormously successful for the DA. It swallowed up the New National Party, it drew together and united racial minorities and strengthened its electoral position exponentially. But the result was a hardening of attitudes. The ANC shifted deeper into racial nationalism, abandoning the political space of nonracial South Africanism, leaving it up for grabs by a new owner.
By the time SA was well into the Zuma years, with corruption, cronyism and patronage insatiably on the hunt for new opportunities, the ANC had unwittingly defined an ideological space for the opposition: the alternative to itself was an SA that belongs to all who live in it. It was here that Maimane appeared and the DA’s project to reinvent itself gathered steam. That platform has now been rudely ripped from under it.
Can Ramaphosa reset SA on the Mandela course? If so, it cannot be a nonracialism that, as in the Mandela years, lets white people so easily off the hook and allows inequality to endure, quietly being tinkered with by social grants in the background. Mandela’s nonracialism lost traction because Mbeki’s Africanism resonated. He understood very well that 300 years of subjugation of black people needed an economic, political and personal psychological solution.
The practical thrust of Ramaphosa’s speech was geared to tackling the reality of black exclusion. With youth unemployment as the policy priority, everything must be geared towards the objective of drawing young people into work through public employment, labour market programmes such as internships, and through genuine improvement in education.
Rebuilding and facilitating recovery will be difficult. Ramaphosa has an enormous amount to do to rebuild the state and revive the National Development Plan, which has gathered dust for almost 10 years.
Politically, to survive he must clean up, renew and modernise the ANC. He also has an opportunity to restart the process of building a nation.
If he is able to play a smart game, he could also do what Mandela hoped for: the building of a broader national coalition.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.