Barely a day has passed in the last four months without someone saying how much more comfortable Cyril Ramaphosa looks sharing power. And how good he is at it.
It’s been quite a turnaround. When the year began he was the loyalist who put party over country, the weak man without the balls to go after the corrupt, the vacillating man unable to make a decision. Is he still all of those things? Or has the discipline of the government of national unity (GNU) changed him? How should we be thinking about the president now?
Characterising Ramaphosa as a weak man who would not go after the corrupt was never quite right because the fundamental problem was always far bigger than corruption.
Any political order requires for its survival that the layers of elite personnel who together run the country — bureaucrats, politicians, judges, lawyers, business leaders — buy into its core values. In the early 2010s SA found itself in the shocking situation where large and influential constituencies at the heart of its governing party had pitted themselves against the core values of their country’s political order.
It is important to characterise Jacob Zuma that way. It is not just that he had a project to strip state assets. Through ANC party structures and through the state bureaucracy, he rallied a large and diverse alliance against the cornerstones of constitutional democracy.
The distinction matters enormously. If the problem is just corruption, you go after the corrupt. But if your party is split over core political values it isn’t that simple, for the justice officials you ask to go after the corrupt aren’t necessarily on your side. And firing a rotten official is regarded by half of your party not as a bold act of leadership, but as a move in a political battle.
No leader has been successful until his project outlives him. In 2027 the ANC will elect a new president. As things stand, there is nobody in Ramaphosa’s party with the gravitas to take over his project.
I am grateful Ramaphosa didn’t listen to impatient pundits telling him to be ruthless. For he would have lost and SA would have been governed again by monsters. Once was enough to do generations of damage; twice would have been too much.
So how is he doing if things are framed this way? I would argue that in an extraordinarily tough situation he is halfway to success. He has pushed the key personnel in the ANC’s anti-constitutional movement out of his party and forced them to contest elections. For the first time, voters get to choose between constitutionalists and a populist pitch for another political order.
This is one of the major milestones in post-apartheid history. Nor have Ramaphosa’s opponents derailed his project of institutional reform. It is much delayed and much flawed, but it has survived and it moves forward.
I say halfway to success because the near future is so uncertain. No leader has been successful until his project outlives him. In 2027 the ANC will elect a new president. As things stand, there is nobody in Ramaphosa’s party with the gravitas to take over his project.
His most likely successor, Paul Mashatile, has dubious allegiances, is of dubious calibre, and his party knows that under his leadership the ANC will continue to bleed support. Ramaphosa may just leave a mess of a party behind him, divided over who should lead, what it values, and what to do in the face of a shrinking future.
But perhaps by then what happens to the ANC won’t matter as much as it has until now. Perhaps the important thing is that new markers have been set on a new terrain: the defenders of the constitutional order, in all their variety, versus a populist alternative. And perhaps we will thank Ramaphosa for having been the one to establish this new terrain, taking a battle over core values out of his party and presenting them to the electorate.
For that battle is not just about corruption. And it is not just about the ANC. It is about whether SA still wants its constitutional order. It is a fight that will never go away.
• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.
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