From as far back as his teenage years, Lyndon Johnson wanted to be US president. Every step he took was calculated to serve that purpose. That he was a nobody from a nowhere town in Texas didn’t deter him for a moment.
There was just one period in his life — from 1941, when he lost an election for a seat in the US Senate, to 1947, when he stood successfully for the same seat — during which he believed his dream had been thwarted. In those years, he instead used the political connections he had acquired to become a millionaire.
Deploying his inside knowledge of the broadcast regulatory authority, he bought a local radio station for a fraction of its real value. Then he used his connections in Washington to get big national broadcasters to cycle famous programmes through his little Texan station. By the time he returned his focus to becoming president, the radio station was no longer small and Johnson was rich.
Hearing this story, it is hard not to think of Cyril Ramaphosa. By 1994, he badly wanted to become successor to Nelson Mandela and run SA.
Having led the ANC so skilfully in negotiating the transition to democracy, he felt he’d earned it. When he lost out to Thabo Mbeki and thought that his dream had died, he invested his political capital in getting rich.
Now, his dream has returned; becoming president is once more a real prospect. As with Johnson, making a lot of money may turn out to be no more than an interlude in his career.
Has getting rich changed him? And will it shape his prospective presidency?
In the early 1980s, when Ramaphosa was running the newly founded National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), he proved himself a smart tactician. At that time, migrant workers from Mpondoland and Lesotho were growing increasingly angry. Organised not as unionised workers but in village-based and regional networks, they were primed to stage insurgent campaigns against an unjust labour relations system. They were unafraid to use violence. And they were even less afraid to face the violence of their foes. Ramaphosa was smart enough to ride this tide; on the back of its energy, NUM became the biggest union in South African history.
Almost three decades later, history repeated itself in the most uncanny fashion. Once more, workers began to organise, not in a union but in village-based and regional networks. Once more, they launched an insurgency against an industrial relations system that had treated them callously. This time, the union Ramaphosa had built was on the other side. And he was a board member of a company with whom workers were in bitter dispute.
I’d love to know what he was thinking when he sent the famous e-mail describing the workers’ acts as criminal. Was he aware of the irony? Did he clock that he was now fighting the very tide that had swept him to fame all those years ago? Probably not.
I suspect that he is the sort of person who sees the future and not the past.
Does any of this matter? Will it shape Ramaphosa’s prospective presidency? You bet it will. At the risk of hyperbole, I would venture that this is the worst time since the Great Depression for a billionaire, his money made simply because he happened to be at the heart of an ascending political establishment, to become president of any country anywhere in the world. We are living through a sea change in what ordinary people think. From Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to Lagos and Lusikisiki, people have lost faith in politicians; they think them servants of shadowy corporations that secretly run the world. We kid ourselves into believing that SA is somehow sheltered from this syndrome. We think that because the board members of corporations are fighting our poisonous president, ordinary people believe capital to be on their side.
That is a delusion. Those who think South Africans loathe Jacob Zuma more than they fear and mistrust banks and mining houses need to get out more. They are simply not listening to the dinner-table conversations in townships and villages across SA.
When Johnson became president, he did all in his power to conceal how rich he had become. He understood that the story of his gathering wealth would weaken his presidency. Ramaphosa is not so free to shape his story.
The link between his establishment credentials and his money simply is his story. It is an unfortunate tale with which to saddle a head of state in these times.
Should he become president, do not expect a rejuvenated relationship between leader and people. Expect popular cynicism about wealth, politics and power to deepen.
• Steinberg teaches African Studies at Oxford University and is visiting professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.
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