The battle for the ANC is increasingly being described as a fight between good and evil. According to this view, the side that wants Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to be the party’s next president is prepared to buy the votes of ANC branches. Cyril Ramaphosa’s campaign, it is said, would never do that. If he wins it will be because the rank and file are tired of the rot and have warmed to his promise of a cleansed ANC.
Dlamini-Zuma has rooting for her people who would intimidate and even kill their adversaries, this view suggests. Behind her are forces prepared to cancel elections and suspend democracy to keep power. Those backing Ramaphosa harbour no such people.
Dlamini-Zuma’s backers are in politics to get rich, it is said; they are after power so that they can rig tenders and steer public money into private hands. Ramaphosa’s people, in contrast, want to save SA’s public institutions from ruin.
None of these distinctions holds up to scrutiny. To cite just one of many examples, Ramaphosa’s camp has the support of much of the Eastern Cape, a province steeped in corruption and skulduggery, where assassination is increasingly an instrument of choice. ANC politics there ticks all the boxes on the Dlamini-Zuma side of the equation and yet not a single ANC branch in the province supports her.
If Ramaphosa were to bring aboard only those who are clean, his ship would sail empty. If he is to have any prospect of winning in December, he must sup with all sorts.
As things stand, both sides have calculated that whoever loses in Mpumalanga on the conference floor will lose the ANC. If these calculations are right, the prospective winner must make a deal with Mpumalanga premier David Mabuza, a man at the heart of the premier league. Aware that his bargaining position is strong, he has let both sides know that his allegiances are for sale.
I am not for a moment suggesting that there is little difference between Ramaphosa and Dlamini-Zuma, nor that it doesn’t matter who wins. But to paint the conflict as simply between good and evil is to close our imaginations to what might happen when December rolls round.
The ANC resembles a market place as much as it does a political party – the allegiances of many are for sale. And if this is the case, the very idea that there are two sides is a misnomer. The situation is far more fluid than that. If, in the hours before voting, neither Ramaphosa nor Dlamini-Zuma is sure to win, their supporters are liable to abandon them in droves, right there on the conference floor, for a third candidate who swoops in to take the crown.
We have short memories. The ANC has been as much a market as a party for a decade now. On the evening before the party voted for its president at Polokwane in 2007, Thabo Mbeki believed that he had won. His mistake was to have assumed that the trading had ended.
If Ramaphosa is sufficiently cunning to win, what might his presidency look like? Certainly, the Guptas would be toast, their South African adventure over. Ramaphosa would take back the Treasury, the prosecutions authority and the police. The likes of Shaun Abrahams and Tom Moyane would go. Their departure would feel like catharsis. A prospective Ramaphosa presidency is thus worth its weight in gold.
But if he is to win, Ramaphosa will have made promises to people who have killed and thieved and lied. And the first matter to cross the desk of the new national director of public prosecutions will be whom to prosecute for the crimes of the Zuma era.
If the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) goes after everyone who is guilty, Ramaphosa’s governing alliance will fall apart. He will have to stop the NPA. If this involves firing his new public prosecutor and appointing a puppet, he will do it. And what if the NPA goes after some and not others? It will be hard to escape the conclusion that those who made a deal with Ramaphosa have been sheltered from justice while those who opposed him are sacrificial lambs.
The ensuing bitterness will start another war in the governing party.
The ANC, I am suggesting, is burdened with the rot of the Zuma era and will have no choice but to bring some of it into the post-Zuma order.
So, yes, let us hope that Ramaphosa wins for there is much at stake. But let us not kid ourselves that all the good is on one side, all the evil on the other. Leading the ANC has become incompatible with observing basic constitutional principles such as the separation of powers. This will remain true no matter who becomes president.
• Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University and is a visiting professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.
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