PEDRO MZILENI | Top reasons why Ramaphosa failed in his presidency

President Cyril Ramaphosa failed for the following five reasons:

• First, his presidency did not tackle the most important issues that face ordinary people on a daily basis. People are jobless and are struggling with crime. Households go to bed hungry from extreme poverty and social grants are too low and unsustainable. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening and this is accelerating the structural crisis of racism and sexism. Rape and murder are on the rise and we are losing our youth to drugs and alcohol. Ramaphosa did not preoccupy himself with these issues as primary assignments of national transformation as president.

• Second, he was buying people’s faces, taking too long to make strategic appointments, and to dismiss people who are failing around him. From the beginning, he did not decisively remove the wrong people in government, in the ANC, and in key state institutions in order to have them replaced quickly by his own army that would execute his mandate immediately. If I had the space and time here, I would write the long list of ministers, boards and CEOs of SOEs, executive mayors, senior executives and officials in all spheres and components of government that he should have replaced in order to run quicker towards his targets – if he had any.

• Third, maybe he took too long to make these decisions I’m raising in the previous point because he thought he would have more time in power. From the onset, because Ramaphosa was elected after Zuma who was obviously a mess, he thought that he would have a full 10-year stay as head of state. He did not have a sense of urgency about anything significant as president. He was already talking about fixing Eskom by 2027 for an example – a shocking observation. He honestly did not see the Phala Phala scandal coming. He thought he was untouchable and he thought he would slide through the presidency by just having a good PR campaign and good speech.

• Fourth, he did not take the task of being ANC president seriously. If you want to have a cohesive organisation and kill factionalism decisively, you need an ANC president who is involved in the daily affairs of the ANC across all structures, especially in regions – a leader who is willing to get his hands dirty and get serious about leading this type of an organisation. The ANC machinery also gives a leader an opportunity to touch base with the most ordinary and most remote areas of our country outside the bureaucratic constraints of the state. There you get to interact more closely and informally with people who are mayors, councillors, branch secretaries, activists, the elderly and people who survive month-to-month on social grants – and when you meet these kind of people, you must listen to their local politics, their problems, their plans and aspirations, and make a commitment to address those issues honestly.

Ramaphosa did not do this. On weekends, he was in Washington and Davos speaking to climate change elites instead of being in wards and branches of Khayelitsha, Mdantsane and Lamontville. Part of me even thinks that he hated the fact that being head of state must also come with a political responsibility of heading the ANC. I even doubt that he has ever been to Luthuli House on more than five occasions throughout his term.

• Lastly, he was a difficult leader to listen to. In politics, talking and speeches are a strong medium to communicate how you want society to be organised as a leader for present times and for the future. Ramaphosa was not an easy person to listen to precisely because his main focus when he speaks is to say things in the right English so that they can have a safe landing in your ears. Whenever he spoke, on any platform, he would say things that the audience wanted to hear. He would speak to mining bosses in a hotel conference in Cape Town in the morning about anti-labour investment opportunities in SA to a standing ovation, and later in the evening he would again speak to a Cosatu conference about mining workes's rights to another standing ovation. Three months down the line you wouldn’t hear about any tangible work done to actually implement any of the things he said.

In essence, it was so difficult to comprehend where he stood on issues. It was difficult to trust him on any matter that he could stand on with a backbone and see it through. Society just does not have a clear idea of the things he wants to do and the things he does not want to do.

But, more than anything else, we as South Africans must begin to ask ourselves some serious questions about our constitutional democracy and the power we have in it. We have tried all the options that the ANC has given us and we are still in this mess. On days like these, we rely on the mercy of 86 individuals in the ANC NEC or the 3 500 that will be conference delegates at Nasrec to tell us what should happen to our country.

The 60 million of us are powerless and watching our lives getting rearranged as if we don’t exist. Such a system sounds rigged and it renders us powerless. It’s not a democracy. Therefore, when the ANC dies as the obvious trajectory suggests, we need to have a more serious conversation about the kind of plan we should develop to give power back to the citizens to organise their country at their own will.