PETER BRUCE: Ramaphosa names his slate. What is he up to?

I am fascinated by Cyril Ramaphosa’s decision, at the weekend, to actually name his slate for the African National Congress (ANC) leadership elections in December. The congress elects what the party calls its “Top 6”, the small collective that runs the party, as well as a new national executive committee (NEC).

Out of nowhere, Ramaphosa announced that the veteran minister (I can count home affairs and science & technology and education in her previous portfolios) Naledi Pandor, would be his candidate for deputy president of the party. Her dad, whom I met a few times in Gaborone in the bad old days, was a legendary ANC figure in exile, Joe Matthews.

So she has a place at any ANC table. But deputy president? Surely not. What is Ramaphosa up to?

Remember, he is basically up against President Jacob Zuma’s candidate, Zuma’s former wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, for the leadership of the party. To beat her he has to do well in KwaZulu Natal and Mpumalanga.

Pandor is nominally from KZN but has never really played much of a provincial role there. As party chairman he named current secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, as treasurer-general Gauteng’s Paul Mashatile, former KZN party leader Senzo Mchunu as secretary-general and Thoko Didiza as deputy secretary-general.

Pandor has a few things going for her. She is untainted by controversy (though the ruinous travel rules Malusi Gigaba drove through at home affairs were basically of her design). It seemed at one stage that the necessary female candidate he pretty well had to name for the deputy’s job would be Lindiwe Sisulu but she has taken a few swipes at him in the past few weeks and, more importantly, made a complete hash of an answer about Fezekile Kuzwayo “Khwezi”, the woman Zuma was charged with raping more than a decade ago, in a radio interview with Eusebius McKaiser a few weeks ago.

By naming a slate now, this early (the conference is about 50 days away), Ramaphosa has either been very smart or he’s been panicked into it. He surely cannot hope to take KZN based on Mchunu (though he is popular in the province) alone. So we must presume his list is not final and that it is merely the start of a negotiation of sorts.

Critically, he needs to get either the current treasurer-general, Zweli Mkhize, and/or current ANC leader in Mpumalanga, David Mabuza, on board. Preferably both. Mkhize is determined to be in the final Top 6 and Mabuza is ambitious for a national role. Also, he has done so well recruiting new members to the ANC in Mpumalanga it is now, after KZN, the second-largest province, in terms of representation, at the elective conference.

It must mean, surely, that Pandor’s position is tradable. The same would apply to Mantashe. He is extremely useful now because he will basically run the conference and have a huge say in which delegates are legitimate or not. But does he have the stamina for another five years in the chaos that is the party machine? I doubt it. Perhaps the deputy secretary-general slot on his slate is also tradable and will give him some room to manoeuvre with names. But who would regard Jessie Duarte’s job as any kind of a prize?

For Ramaphosa, a lot depends on whether or not a woman is a “must have” at the top of the slate. Dlamini-Zuma’s campaign has been drained of any real intellectual content by the fact that she is campaigning primarily as a woman. Some of that has stuck. But she has also been careful to put some policy meat on the bones of her otherwise gender-centred campaign.

Counts of early branch nominations have put Ramaphosa in the lead. But he is battling in KZN, where supporters are being turned away (says his campaign) from nomination meetings by police. And we have yet to hear anything definitive from Mpumalanga.

Fortunately for Ramaphosa, Dlamini-Zuma has run a lacklustre campaign. Good and thoughtful company in private, she is awful with crowds. And two weeks in a row now the Sunday Times has accused her, based on Jacques Pauw’s sensational new book, The President’s Keepers, of consorting with tobacco smugglers.

This last Sunday the front page was full of her and people she just should not be talking to. Pauw claims they are funding her campaign and the more she denies it, I suspect, the more incriminating pictures the Sunday Times will find. They seem to delight in being pictured with their arms around her. Like they already own her.

Whether or not this does her any harm for the party race is hard to know. It will certainly came back to damage her should she win in December and then lead the party into a general election in 2019. She is already tainted by the fact that she is Zuma’s candidate; a whole new coterie of shady backers and cronies who are not the Guptas could sink her.

You rather got a feel for the fragility of the Zuma/Dlamini-Zuma campaign yesterday when Zuma, speaking to an unnervingly small crowd in Kagiso in Gauteng at the weekend, railed against the evil “West” which he said had fought tooth and nail to get the old apartheid government to destroy its nuclear warheads before the arrival of democracy in 1994. The same “West” he said, was now trying to stop his pet project — the construction of a fleet of nuclear power stations most likely to be built by the Russians, the ANC’s old struggle ally.

This is patent rubbish. For a start, the seven nuclear warheads SA had built have not been destroyed. They have merely been dismantled and they sit in that state at the Pelindaba facility outside Pretoria. Zuma could order them re-assembled if he wanted to stand up to the West.

That would have another price though, sanctions, which he would not enjoy and which Dlamini-Zuma would have to deal with.

Also, the West he talks about is the US. Why else would the French not only have been invited to tender but also stand a good chance of winning some work in the build programme? And Westinghouse, which could also be a bidder though it is now owned primarily by the Japanese, still uses American nuclear technology.

Zuma was rattled back in December 2015, weeks after he had fired Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister, when he took a phone call from then US President Barack Obama to inform him that US intelligence had detected a security breach at Pelindaba. Obama told him not to worry, the breach had not been severe.

When the South Africans checked, they confirmed what the Americans had seen first. The Americans watch the warheads at Pelindaba like hawks and Obama further infuriated Zuma when he offered Zuma a significant US investment in renewable energy in SA in return for the dismantled warheads. He turned Obama down.

To this day, that breach has never been reported or reported on.

But Zuma is genuinely afraid of the West and sees himself in the middle of a “war” between Russia and the West. He has chosen his side. Never mind that the Russians make no investments in SA. A few days before he made his remarks, Ford, the US motor company, announced a R3bn investment in its automobile factory outside Pretoria. In Zuma’s mind it would change nothing. We are Russian allies today.

For now, that is. If Ramaphosa and his slate, whatever final shape it takes, wins in December our foreign policy will reshape itself. The place to be is somewhere in the centre, somewhere neutral and nonaligned. We don’t have to take sides. But there are still those 50 days to go. Anything could happen.