“He had not been dreaming; he was sure of that. Rather, it was as if he had been living a second life and now he was returning to his old existence as might a man recovering from amnesia. Though he was still dazed, one clear conviction came into his mind. He must never again sleep in Comarre.”
Arthur C Clarke, The Lion of Comarre, 1968
President Cyril Ramaphosa is like water: you can’t really hold him in your hand. He has no particular shape. Try to squeeze him and he escapes between the fingers; try to describe him and he changes form.
He is, like Jacob Zuma in his early days, all things to all people. His actual character and political disposition has been moulded more around the idea of him than the actual content of his character. And it is an idea imbued with so much hope and faith it is almost romantic in the belief that, just below the platitudes, there lies something profound, waiting to blossom and brighten the political landscape.
There are many tests of a political leader. One of them is conviction — the notion that a leader leads, through principle and ideas, and the power of those arguments that underpin them. But Ramaphosa defies this test.
He has convictions, we are told. His ANC presidential campaign website told us: “He is tough on corruption.” Everyone believes it.
But, he is not tough on corruption. Then again, he is not weak on it either. He is, as he is with all things, merely on corruption, but that is all. He is on everything, but on top of nothing. And a lack of conviction has a lot to do with it.
His ANC presidential campaign website told us: ‘He is tough on corruption.’ Everyone believes it. But, he is not tough on corruption.
All this wild hope, invested blindly in the idea of Cyril Ramaphosa, is a cruel burden for anyone to bear. Yet, it is helpful too. It means, for the most part, you get the benefit of the doubt, for two reasons. First, any ambiguity is inevitably framed in your favour; second, any obstacle — of which “ANC internal politics” is pre-eminent — is used to justify limited action, euphemism rather than condemnation and selective morality.
It’s hard to lose when those are the rules that define so much public expectation. But, if conviction is your measure, if Ramaphosa is indeed “tough on corruption”, they do leave you scratching your head and wondering, when is the actual “toughness” going to manifest?
Inquiries are good; an impartial and competent director of public prosecutions is good; new boards are good. But then, they are also common cause: a baseline measure of accountability and good governance. But not conviction: conviction you will find in other places, in those decisions that cost you popularity and political capital.
Ramaphosa doesn’t do that. It is easy to counter that objection by caricaturing it as extreme. “What do you expect? For the president to go down in a blaze of moral indignation, and achieve nothing but outrage.”
Perhaps. That, at least, would confirm he possesses the steeled backbone he claims to have. And who knows, the lessons we might all learn from that could be more valuable than the act itself. Any democracy needs powerful precedents to mature and grow. Sometimes they achieve nothing in and of themselves but, with time and reflection, define behaviours and attitudes on a far greater scale.
Alas, that is not SA. We are a cautious nation, primarily because, more often than not, so many want the ANC to succeed. The ANC, however, does not want to succeed; it just wants power. Power is its own legitimacy for a party forged in low self-esteem. It is why we have national airlines and billions of rand for VIP protection.
Without power, as in the Western Cape, the ANC is reduced to what it really is: a bumbling collection of clueless fools, playing a game called politics they read about somewhere, but perpetually losing.
Power gives mediocrity the illusion of authority. It makes you carefully consider idiocy, as if some profundity, and excuse incompetence in the name of popular appeal. It is all that underpins the ANC these days — power. And the party’s hold upon that, even on the back of devastation too big properly to contemplate, is relatively certain, at least for another five years.
Thus, the grand game that is South African mediocrity can be allowed to play on, at the cost of so much; indulged and wished away by those who live in some imagined future that bears no resemblance to reality.
It is, for Cyril Ramaphosa, an environment in which he can flourish. In the land of mediocrity, those who can feign conviction are king. Just as in the land of low expectations, doing the right thing is the mark of exceptionalism.
Ramaphosa says Bathabile Dlamini is doing a “fantastic job”. That she has “raised the bar”. He says Ace Magashule is his boss. The songs of praise he has sung for Jacob Zuma are many and various, all glowing and warm and infused with some much deference and appreciation
Those three examples are telling. They are a test of conviction: the former ANC president, the head of the ANC Women’s League and the ANC secretary-general. If you are “tough on corruption”, they deserve, at the very least, some small condemnation. Is that unfair? To ask that Ramaphosa do no more than say they have failed? Just to say, for the sake of principle, he thinks they have done some harm? Just that — the tiniest morsel of moral conviction, to throw us only that scrap?
Of course it is. That is just how much we are now willing to excuse. So desperate are we that we cannot even bring ourselves to demand the president speak the truth. From there, one can only contemplate what there is left to relinquish, after you have argued away something as fundamental as the truth, in the name of expediency and hope. Not much, is the answer. If you do not have to speak the truth, it doesn’t matter what you say. And Ramaphosa has been given the all clear on that front.
But let us not lay all the blame on those who facilitate this sort of disdain for honesty and truth. What of the great man himself? What of Cyril Ramaphosa and his “toughness”? What of his personal convictions? It doesn’t matter either. There is no Cyril Ramaphosa. Just a metaphor of a man we fill with whatever feels good and necessary.
We must strengthen the man, give him support and back him at the expense of all else. Faith counts for nothing on its own. The proof of it lies in what you offer up. And so, for the ultimate political pyramid scheme, we are constantly called upon to invest ever more heavily in the idea, just as we are told to believe it will make millionaires of us all soon enough.
Of course he is tough on corruption. He is brave and principled, too. He is a leader, constrained by circumstance but secretly prepared to die in the ditch for what is good and right. He will take his own son to the police station if need be.
What a gloriously comforting dream. Ignorance, they say, is bliss. Then you remember, Ramaphosa also said, “There was no corruption, nothing to do with Nkandla was unlawful.” And it jars. But just for a moment, before it is swept aside. Our deep sleep must not be disturbed; it is a far nicer state of mind than the harsh world that awaits, should we ever awaken.
It is all encompassing, this dream. To live it you need not only believe Ramaphosa to be the great redeemer, but that the ANC is redeemable. The former you might be able to forgive, in the name of optimism; the latter you cannot, for it requires double-think more than faith, and that is a mental faculty open only to the brainwashed. It is the zealot, immune to evidence and reason, who sees in the ANC an institutional culture anything other than rotten to the core.
Some would have it we should surrender to the inevitability of it all: the ANC will win, Ramaphosa will be president, he is the best we have got — our only hope at some semblance of a better tomorrow. You have to admire those who take that view. It is brave indeed, to kill off your own imagination in the name of blind faith. They send us frequent dispatches from the other side of the curtain. What a wondrous world they see.
But sad too, from the outside, looking in. Why is it we seem always to be called upon to support the lesser of two evils? Why can we not aspire to something better, and pursue that? We cannot. That is the effect of mediocrity on the public mind, and the nature of the stupor it induces.
The South African dream: did we ever decide what that was, exactly? It had something to do with the future, and the future had something to do with the present. But it has drifted off now, into the sunset — broken free of its moorings, it is whatever you want it to be. And so many want it to be Cyril Ramaphosa. A dreamland more than a dream.
In the Lion of Commare, Arthur C Clarke writes of the horror experienced by the protagonist, Peyton, as he is torn from an idyllic illusion, and brought back to the here and now: “Then paradise trembled and dissolved around him. He gave a great cry of anguish as everything he loved was wrenched away. Only the swiftness of the transition saved his mind. When it was over, he felt as Adam must have when the gates of Eden clanged forever shut behind him.”
We have our City of Commare. It is on that fantasy island that the idea of a new SA now resides. There, we are led by a man of conviction. It feels good enough. Long may it last, because if we do wake up, a set of very real and very terrible truths will likely snap what little is left of the public mind.
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the South African Institute of Race Relations.
It is the zealot, immune to evidence and reason, who sees in the ANC an institutional culture anything other than rotten to the core.
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