President Cyril Ramaphosa is constantly compared with Thabo Mbeki, for the most part unfavourably. Where Mbeki governed decisively, it is argued, Ramaphosa dithers. Where Mbeki took on ANC factions, Ramaphosa rolls over.
The two men have not been much compared, though, with regard to their views on the rule of law. The distinctions between them here are subtle rather than glaring, but they are also profound.
When Kenneth Kaunda died a fortnight ago, Mbeki made the strangest comment. In expressing his appreciation for the solidarity Kaunda showed to the exiled ANC, he told a story. Zambian police, he said, tipped him off that an ANC member was involved in drug dealing and was about to be arrested. Perhaps you should quickly get him out of the country so that when we look for him we do not find him, Mbeki was quietly advised.
Of all the things Kaunda did for the ANC — at times holding his own country’s future to ransom — it is amazing that Mbeki chose to tell this story. The ANC achieved unlikely triumphs in exile. Amid the cold war, it successfully pitched itself as the sole representative of black South Africans in the West and the Soviet bloc. At home, in the mid-1980s, it sold itself to the youth on the barricades as a messianic saviour, despite being out of touch and far away.
These are very fine achievements. But some of its senior personnel smuggled drugs and tortured innocent people; this too is a legacy of the ANC. That Mbeki salutes an ally for allowing ANC members to evade the law speaks to his depths in ways he may not have intended.
Throughout modern history a fundamental divide has riven political thought. On one side are those who refuse to justify means by ends; they place immense weight in law, not as an instrument but for its intrinsic value, for law holds human beings to universal standards of conduct. On the other are those who are happy to sacrifice moral clarity for the sake of a cause, to allow repugnance now for the sake of an imagined state to come.
For generations, senior ANC personnel have found themselves on either side of this great divide. A year after the organisation’s unbanning, for instance, when Winnie Mandela stood trial, several of her co-accused and a key state witness disappeared, whisked across the border by ANC personnel. Half of the ANC was horrified that their organisation would do this; the other half quietly applauded.
It is not clear on which side of this divide Mbeki stands. He can talk about due process, law and procedure as eloquently as anyone. But when he was president and push came to shove, he could not help himself from using precious institutions, such as the police and prosecuting authority, as weapons against his foes. The architecture of SA’s public life has been paying the price ever since.
Ramaphosa, by contrast, stands clearly on one side of the great divide. If anything has defined his presidency, it is his fidelity to the pre-eminence of rules. This is evident from the painfully procedural manner he runs his party and in the steadfast arm’s length he keeps from law-enforcement institutions.
People complain bitterly of his slowness and his indecision, not realising his courage. He is establishing a precedent, one everyone who exercises power fears: that in the heat of a crisis when the stakes are high, an agreed-upon set of rules rather than the strongest person in the room, will decide the outcome. He has set himself on relinquishing personal power for the power of procedure, displaying a wisdom and respect for the future his predecessors did not possess.
We witnessed something historic this week: the sentencing to prison of a former head of state. It happened in part because Ramaphosa governs in a manner that leaves the sheen on independent institutions intact. The same cannot be said for anyone else who has governed SA since Nelson Mandela.
• Steinberg is a research associate at Oxford University’s African Studies Centre.
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