Things are the wrong way around in the ANC. You would expect President Cyril Ramaphosa’s faction to be better at organisation than the radical economic transformation (RET) faction. And the RETs should by rights be better than Ramaphosa’s people at politics.
After all, Ramaphosa’s project is to reassemble a functioning bureaucracy, restore technocratic authority to government and bring a semblance of rationality back into public life. These are questions of organisation.
As for the RET faction, you would think it had little time for organisation and would instead invest its energy in the arts of politics. It is a populist faction, after all; its currency is charismatic leadership and rhetorical skill.
But actually, the reverse is true. The RET faction has resolutely failed to find a credible figure to lead it. Supporters of Jacob Zuma have dwindled to an almost exclusively Zulu-speaking base of the faithful in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. Ace Magashule barely got out of the starting blocks. Julius Malema would love to come back as the lodestar of the RET faction, but his ratings among the general population are far too low.
The only ANC figure with anything like the credibility to claim to lead the nation is Ramaphosa, recent mishaps notwithstanding. He is, for now at least, the sum of the ANC’s political talent. But he is hardly the sum of its organisational skill. For anyone paying attention, the RET faction is rich in practical sophistication. Time and again it gets delicate, complex tasks done.
Take its performance on the Judicial Services Commission (JSC). It decided to remove David Unterhalter as a prospective Constitutional Court justice and executed its plan to a T. Somebody combed the scores of judgments he had been party to for the slightest hint of what may or may not have been an inconsequential procedural error. It was found, packaged and tossed into a public hearing. The creativity, the orchestration, the mobilisation of specialist talent, the attention to the finest detail: this was a masterclass in complex planning.
The JSC hearings were the least of it. Most spectacular was the violence last July. One need not be a narrow conspiracy theorist to grasp that it would not have played out as it did without a finely calibrated scheme. The simultaneous attacks on key points, road infrastructure and retail centres; the use of social media to mobilise enough people across space. This was a delicate feat of engineering at work across many fronts.
Most striking of all is the RET faction’s capacity to see into the heart of Ramaphosa’s far less impressive operation. The president is in trouble not because he stuffed money into his sofa, but because of his hapless attempt at a cover-up after it was stolen. His protection team appears to have involved itself in a comic medley of lawbreaking and incompetence.
The RET faction had a front-row seat to this sad performance and then broadcast it to the world. It could do so because its networks extend throughout the security apparatus, including to personnel close to the president himself.
The RET faction’s great disappointment was not to win the ANC presidency for Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. It failed in part because its candidate was weak, and in part because two shrewd operators — Paul Mashatile and David Mabuza — conspired against it. It was a huge opportunity missed.
As it heads towards the ANC’s elective conference in December the RET faction’s greatest weakness remains the absence of a credible candidate. It has purpose and sophistication in droves. What it lacks is political talent. But don’t count on that lasting forever. Political talent is attracted to organisational skill. If you are ambitious you are drawn to those who can get things done.
The people around Ramaphosa are an advertisement for mediocrity. You would not want to rely on them to take you to the seat of power. It is Ramaphosa’s adversaries who have the wherewithal to get you where you need to go.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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