against ‘white monopoly capital’ in the run-up to the Nasrec conference, and he often took digs at Ramaphosa, claiming that he would further the interests of big business. On the other hand, it was the trade union federation Cosatu that was the first formal structure to endorse Ramaphosa for president in December 2016, a year before the Nasrec conference. All this proves that the workings of politics are hinged on fickle opportunism and convenience.
But when Ramaphosa entered the fray in 2017, he was far more insightful and more experienced than in earlier years and he knew just how to play the political game – and win.
Chapter 2
The Nasrec moment
I was a gutsy young journalist who had begged her way into a newsroom when I asked the newly elected deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa in 2013 whether he wanted to be president one day. I was at the time desperate to prove myself as a serious political journalist and naively thought that there was a chance that the new deputy president of the ANC would disclose his political ambitions to me.
‘Yes,’ he said in response, and my heart skipped a beat. In fact, my body clenched and my breath was definitely shorter. ‘Of my golfing club,’ he chuckled.
I tried to laugh but I was actually annoyed. To me, it was a simple yes or no answer. Do you want to be president? Yes or no?
Years later, when his ambition to become president became more pronounced, he played the same joke. He told a room full of journalists and politicians that he was hugely ambitious, so ambitious that he wanted to become the president of the Ankole Cattle Breeders Society.
In the ANC, I have come to learn, it’s deemed wrong to declare in public your political aspirations, but it’s seemingly OK to work relentlessly to have them realised. In essence, you can campaign to be president, but you just can’t say out loud that you want to be one. Ramaphosa wanted to be president. He was not an ambivalent candidate. He knew what he wanted.
I spoke to a number of his close confidants who said he would not have accepted the nomination to become deputy president without eyeing the presidency. But those who made him deputy president saw him as a mere placeholder.
When Ramaphosa became deputy president of the country, he tried in earnest to play down talk that he would be Zuma’s successor, famously telling CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that the issue of being president ‘doesn’t even arise’. But the matter did arise. In fact, Ace Magashule and David Mabuza first raised the issue with him around 2015, asking him whether he would be their candidate for the presidency at the next elective conference.
Ramaphosa’s response to them at the time was that it was too early to be talking about the succession to Zuma so soon into his second term as president. It is perplexing why Ramaphosa did not immediately jump onto that political train as it had a great prospect of success. Finally, towards the end of 2016, Ramaphosa used the ANC equivalent of saying ‘Yes, I want to be president’ by making it known that if the branches of the ANC nominated him for the ANC presidency, he would accept.
This immediately drew the ire of Zuma and his allies, who self-righteously preached that in the ANC people don’t announce publicly that they want to be president. David Mabuza was one who openly denounced Ramaphosa for this, though the latter’s supporters believed there was no better way of staking out a claim than by doing so. They realised that the ANC’s internal election systems had been corrupted and perverted by money and patronage, and that a Kgalema Motlanthe-style campaign of reluctance would not work.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the decision was made to set up a formal campaign structure outside the ANC whose task was to have Ramaphosa elected as party president. The general view is that his camp knew they had to outsmart and outwit the other side by all means necessary and, naturally, they would need a war chest of resources to get going. The aim of formalising the campaign, I was told, was to ensure there was some method to the madness of campaigning. And when people were asked to donate money, there were checks and balances in place. Again, this was alien to popular ANC culture.
The CR17 campaign was at first just a group of Ramaphosa’s friends. Prominent among them was James Motlatsi, his long-time friend and co-founder of the National Union of Mineworkers. The two had later ventured into business together. Another member of the group was Bejani Chauke, the silent fixer who had served as an adviser to North West premier Thandi Modise. Donné Nicol was the person who was seen as closest to Ramaphosa; she was his long-time assistant in the ANC who went along with him into business and became the chief executive officer of the Cyril Ramaphosa Foundation.
The trio got together and decided that Ramaphosa could not rely only on his supporters within the ANC and needed a vehicle which would be set up to formally campaign for him. They took the unprecedented decision to create a formal campaign office almost as if Ramaphosa was a candidate in a US-style primary.
If it had been the primaries, he would have relied on a Super Pac (political action committee) to raise funds and pool together resources. But campaigning for the ANC is banned, believe it or not. The party, somewhat hypocritically, preaches that branch delegates are the only ones who elect leaders. They are meant to use the almost biblical ‘Through the Eye of the Needle’ ANC document from the early 2000s to scrutinise and choose the type of leaders they want.
There is always a disingenuous game played, where leaders claim party elections really represent ‘the will of the people’ while actually they are often engineered by political fixers who make things happen. Often, if branch leaders have aligned themselves with a certain faction, any attempt to oppose their decisions will be met with disruption or violence. If branch leaders fear that the majority would support a leader to whom they are not personally aligned, a branch meeting can be abandoned midway so that no binding decision takes place. The next day or soon afterwards, a meeting is called without the opposing side knowing about it, and very quickly a decision is taken to support the candidate of choice of the branch leadership.
This is how gatekeeping and membership manipulation take place and as a result it becomes easy to ‘buy a branch’. Before Nasrec, there were talks that the ‘cost’ of a branch nomination was between R5000 and R10,000. Such a way of operating calls the true democracy of the ANC into question, and veterans like Kgalema Motlanthe are pessimistic about this system ever ending. But money politics are too far gone in the ANC, and with Ramaphosa it was a case of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’.
When Ramaphosa gave the nod and publicly accepted nomination, he did not want to lose. He had been the victim of ANC internal politicking once before when Thabo Mbeki was chosen as deputy president, and he refused to go through that again. Those who supported him believed they had learned important lessons from the Motlanthe campaign in 2012 and knew that the only way to outwit Zuma and his allies was to beat them at their own game. It was all about groundwork and co-ordination, ensuring that Ramaphosa’s name was sufficiently prominent at a branch level and that his support was solidified.
The CR17 campaign was split into two committees, the fundraising and logistics committee, and the political committee. James Motlatsi, Donné Nicol and Bejani Chauke headed up the fundraising side of things while deputy minister of health and ANC veteran Joe Phaahla headed up the political side. Two of Zuma’s former allies from KwaZulu-Natal, Bheki Cele and Senzo Mchunu, also played a formidable role in the campaign along with Jackson Mthembu and Aaron Motsoaledi. The political committee had to ensure Ramaphosa was given platforms on which to speak and that ANC branches discussed his name as a serious candidate for the ANC presidency.
Ramaphosa had mostly the support of the Limpopo province, led by the chairperson and premier Stanley Mathabatha, and that of Gauteng. But to get the support of Eastern Cape and Northern Cape, two local leadership races had to go his way. In the Eastern Cape Oscar Mabuyane’s win was as important as Zamani Saul’s in the Northern Cape.
The real stakes of these provincial conferences were fully revealed when the Eastern Cape conference descended into bloody chaos. Ramaphosa himself notably described that conference as a ‘festival of chairs’ in reference