[WSMDiscuss] Ramaphosa/Zuma struggle not finished: dynamics within two centres of power will determine South Africa's future

[Brian K Murphy]

~ apologies for cross-postings ~

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/22/south-africas-cattle-king-president/?ct=t(December_29_201712_29_2017)&mc_cid=efd23801cc&mc_eid=f9e43b4167 <http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/22/south-africas-cattle-king-president/?ct=t(December_29_201712_29_2017)&mc_cid=efd23801cc&mc_eid=f9e43b4167>
> South Africa’s Cattle King President
> 
by Mark Gevisser <http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/mark-gevisser/>  NYR Daily, December 22, 2017 | The New York Review of Books 
> Last Monday in Johannesburg, Cyril Ramaphosa, one of South Africa’s wealthiest men <https://mg.co.za/article/2014-09-18-ramaphosa-declares-r76-million-rest-kept-confidential>, narrowly won a party election <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/cyril-ramaphosa-chosen-to-lead-south-africas-ruling-anc-party> to succeed the corrupt and compromised Jacob Zuma as president of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). This puts him in line to become the country’s fifth democratically-elected president. Many think he should have been the second: he was Nelson Mandela’s preferred heir, but was displaced by Zuma and his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, in 1994. He has been playing the long game ever since.
> 
> Zuma’s term as president of the country does not end until mid-2019. But Ramaphosa could unseat him within weeks—and get him prosecuted and, potentially, put behind bars. Will this happen? Can it happen? These are the questions we South Africans are asking ourselves, as we try to work out what kind of leadership Ramaphosa will bring to his decaying party and our troubled land.
> 
> Ramaphosa is a Soweto homeboy <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/19/cyril-ramaphosa-vows-to-unite-anc-after-rise-to-leadership>, the son of a police sergeant, who now lives in a grand home in Hyde Park, one of Johannesburg’s wealthiest suburbs. He qualified as a lawyer—no mean feat in apartheid South Africa—but his roots are in the labor movement and he played an important part in the downfall of the apartheid regime, mobilizing mineworkers. He has long been an avid fly-fisherman <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-20767093> and now owns a cattle-ranch. When I profiled him <https://mg.co.za/article/1996-10-11-cyril-ramaphosa-deputy-chairman-of-new> for a South African newspaper in 1996, just after he left politics and joined the country’s largest new black-owned business, New Africa Investments, I described him as “charming and unflappable, entirely in control”:
> 
> There’s that smile that wraps itself around his face, that conspiratorial baritone chuckle, that constant engagement masking profound reserve. The most astonishing thing about an encounter with Cyril Ramaphosa is that, even though you know he’s spinning you a line, you—oh, hapless trout!—go for the hook anyway.
> 
> I have followed Ramaphosa’s career for three decades. I was astounded by his skills in the 1990s, when he led the ANC’s negotiating team, thrilled at the possibility that he would be Mandela’s successor, and then disappointed by his hubris when he flounced out of politics: he refused, even, to attend <https://mg.co.za/article/2012-11-02-00-ramaphosa-the-ancs-prodigal-son-returns> Mandela’s inauguration in 1994. When I wrote that profile two years later, I was warily interested in the way he was leveraging his political credibility to gain a place at the high table of industry, as a beneficiary of the official policy of “black economic empowerment.” But some fifteen years later, in 2012, I was—like so many South Africans—distressed by the way he used his political connections <https://citizen.co.za/opinion/opinion-columns/1613696/marikana-continues-to-haunt-ramaphosa/> to insist that the police take action against a wildcat strike at a platinum mine in which he held a stake. In the resulting “Marikana massacre,” thirty-four striking miners were killed by police, in an echo of the 1960 Sharpeville shootings.
> 
> Ramaphosa was exonerated <https://www.news24.com/Columnists/Ferial-Haffajee/Where-does-Marikana-report-leave-Ramaphosa-20150626> by a judicial commission of enquiry, but his unseemly role at Marikana became an indicator of the extent to which he had sold his soul. That he has bounced back from this low point demonstrates both his resilience and the broad-based antipathy within the ANC toward Zuma at the moment. Those who voted for Ramaphosa understand that Zuma and his kleptocratic circle need to go if the ANC is to endure, and if the country’s economy is to have any hope of growth. Ramaphosa has, indeed, made millions parlaying his political credibility into assets, but there has never been an allegation of corruption against him; and the principal lieutenants in his election campaign—leading ANC figures like the former finance minister Pravin Gordhan <https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/support-ramaphosa-and-we-will-not-see-a-downgrade-gordhan-20171123>—have a solid reputation as reformers, modernizers, and straight arrows.
> 
> Ramaphosa’s relationship with Zuma (and Zuma’s predecessor, Thabo Mbeki) has been fraught. Although Mbeki and Zuma, then in exile, had negotiated Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990, Ramaphosa and his radical supporters thought the duo too soft; with brutal efficiency, Ramaphosa succeeded in sidelining them and taking over the reins of the talks himself. Ramaphosa, the labor leader, was a tough negotiator, unafraid of brinkmanship, but he also loved the finer things of life and he developed a rapport <https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2017-12-18-ray-hartley-cyril-ramaphosa-reaches-for-his-lifelong-dream/> with his white South African counterparts that helped to usher in democracy. For a while, Ramaphosa was everyone’s hero—except for those ANC comrades around Mbeki and Zuma.
> 
> Mandela made it clear that he wanted Ramaphosa for his deputy, but the old man was outfoxed by Mbeki and Zuma. So began a dynasty of diminishing returns: Mandela appointed Mbeki as his deputy in 1994, and then, when Mandela retired in 1999, Mbeki appointed Zuma in turn. It seemed that Ramaphosa was done with politics, but no one who knew him doubted his ambition—or his need to salve the personal wound of his 1994 ejection. Once Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma fell out with each other (Mbeki fired his deputy over an earlier round of corruption allegations), Ramaphosa reappeared on the political scene as one of the “coalition of the wounded <https://mg.co.za/article/2010-09-03-coalition-of-the-wounded-turn-on-zuma>,” as they were known, that moved to replace Mbeki with Zuma as the party’s president in 2007. Ramaphosa then led the charge to fire Mbeki as president of the country, in 2008, on the grounds of his alleged meddling in the criminal case against Zuma.
> 
> With Mbeki gone, and in uneasy coalition with Zuma, Ramaphosa began again to cultivate his political base. In 2012, he was elected by the party congress as Zuma’s deputy in the ANC. Following a precedent that had become ANC tradition, Zuma duly appointed Ramaphosa as deputy president of the country. Ramaphosa assiduously defended Zuma, and once more, I found myself perplexed by the man I had once admired: How could he keep singing the praises of his venal boss? Was he still playing the long game, or had he succumbed? Was he so intent on attaining power at any cost that he would not take a stand against the naked abuse of power that was happening under his watch? He was the deputy president, after all.
> 
> At last, in December 2015, Ramaphosa made his play. He finally found his voice when President Zuma fired the finance minister <https://qz.com/571712/why-president-zuma-fired-his-finance-minister/>, Nhlanhla Nene, for refusing to rubber-stamp proposals, including an outrageous nuclear deal with Russia that threatens to bankrupt the country, that were clearly designed to enrich Zuma and his cronies. Zuma replaced the respected Nene with a provincial no-namer, the rand crashed, and Ramaphosa began campaigning <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/2017/12/18/how-he-won-nenegate-convinced-cr17-to-mobilise_a_23310334/> to be the next leader on an anticorruption ticket <https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/relaxed-ramaphosa-heads-for-final-stretch-20171210-2>. This meant pitting himself against Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who had already been selected by the Zuma faction to succeed her ex-husband. Zuma and his ex-wife had gone through a bitter divorce and not spoken for years, but they share children and seem to have reconciled <https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1411887/nkandla-door-always-open-for-regular-visitor-dlamini-zuma-sources-claim/>.
> 
> Dlamini-Zuma is a seasoned politician, and was a competent cabinet minister for many years (health, foreign affairs, home affairs) before going to Ethiopia to run the African Union. But she is also an ideologue, with black-nationalist roots, who has espoused a left-wing policy of “radical economic transformation <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/2017/12/14/cyril-and-ndz-here-is-how-their-plans-converge-and-differ_a_23307298/>,” including state-led economic growth. Although there is no whiff of corruption about her personally, it was hard not to see her platform as populist cover for continued plunder—given the Zuma coterie that was backing her. In his recent book The President’s Keepers, the investigative journalist Jacques Pauw disclosed <https://www.thesouthafrican.com/the-presidents-keepers-most-shocking-claims-jacques-pauw/> not only the extent of the rot around Zuma—especially in the state security and revenue services—but also that his ex-wife’s campaign was financed by a particularly unsavory set of cronies: tobacco smugglers scheming to get around the import duties that are arguably part of Dlamini-Zuma’s most enduring legacy, as an anti-smoking campaigner.
> 
> Ramaphosa’s New Deal platform, self-consciously borrowed from Franklin D. Roosevelt, was low on detail, but hewed toward the center, and advocated partnerships between government, business, and labor. During the campaign, Dlamini-Zuma and her supporters worked hard to tar Ramaphosa as a stooge of “white monopoly capital <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-politcs-dlaminizuma-newsmaker/fierce-and-formidable-dlamini-zuma-eyes-south-africas-presidency-idUSKBN1EA0B5>,” that old ANC foe. She came very close to winning: with the backing of 2,261 delegates, she was only 180 votes short of victory; Ramaphosa won with 2,440.
> 
> Considering the presumed taint of “white monopoly capital” and the Marikana massacre, Cyril Ramaphosa made an odd decision in the heat of his campaign. At his sixty-fifth birthday party last month, attended by both his industrialist friends and his political comrades, he launched Cattle of the Ages, a lavish coffee-table book about his great obsession (besides political power). The book retails at 850 rand (about $40, a large sum in this country): with photographs by the renowned South African photographer Daniel Naudé, it documents the herd of long-horned cattle Ramaphosa had imported from Uganda and now breeds at his ranch on the Mpumalanga escarpment, east of Johannesburg. The Ankole are “the most magnificent breed of cattle in the world,” Ramaphosa writes; they had lit an “unexpected fire in my heart” ever since he’d seen them on a visit <https://www.farmersweekly.co.za/animals/cattle/ankole-longhorn-cyril-ramaphosas-passion-pride/> to the ranch of the Ugandan dictator, Yoweri Museveni, in 2004.
> 
> The Ankole are known as the “Cattle of the Kings”; their extravagant horns curve into regal arcs. Ramaphosa now has over a hundred of these animals; one of his bulls recently fetched <https://www.farmersweekly.co.za/agri-news/south-africa/cyril-ramaphosas-ankole-bull-sells-r640-000/> more than $50,000 at auction. When one looks at the quantum of wealth, Jacob Zuma’s improvements to his rural homestead, funded illegally from the public purse, seem tawdry by comparison. Ramaphosa’s investment may be ostentatious, or canny, but he proclaims loftier motivations for it. At the launch, he spoke of how he had chosen to call the book Cattle of the Ages rather than Cattle of the Kings because of his egalitarian ambitions for the beasts: he plans to loan his animals to developing black farmers to help them improve the bloodlines of their own stock.
> 
> Even if these regal cattle and this glossy book are signs of swagger, or hubris, Ramaphosa has always been intensely conscious of his image. I have no doubt that there is a plan to the way he has cultivated his cattle-obsession and put it into the public domain. Released in the middle of his leadership campaign, Cattle of the Ages is Ramaphosa’s equivalent of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. “Somewhere in the depths of my soul is the connection my father had to his cattle, the hills of Khalavha and his people,” he writes. “My love for cattle could be a reflection of my father in me; or some form of agency on behalf of my father, Samuel Mundzhedzi Ramaphosa,” because as “in most African cultures, cattle are a sign of wealth and stature among my father’s people,” the vhaVenda. Samuel Ramaphosa had tended his family’s herd but he had no opportunity to acquire his own, as he was forced in the apartheid era to migrate to the city for work.
> 
> At the last ANC elective conference, in 2012, the unschooled Jacob Zuma derided “clever” blacks <https://www.news24.com/Archives/City-Press/Zuma-scolds-clever-blacks-20150429>—by which he meant people like Ramaphosa, educated and urban, disconnected from their roots. Through his cattle, Ramaphosa seeks to demonstrate a reconnection with the land and the heritage of his people. And by promising to share his superior Ugandan stock with lesser herdsmen, Ramaphosa is implying that, unlike his parochial predecessor, he is both a pan-Africanist and a progressive. The final piece of his symbolic presentation is showing that he can play the boer at his own game, even in animal husbandry, the very bastion of Afrikaner commercial agriculture. The book details, at some length, how Ramaphosa recruited the best Afrikaans scientists to use embryo transfer to circumvent strict rules about importing livestock. Once more, Ramaphosa is offering a lesson here: he can play by the rules and still get things done. He is both a technocrat and an operator.
> 
> In his victory speech on Thursday, Ramaphosa diverted from his prepared notes to address the party congress’s standout resolution: to revise the country’s constitution so that land could be expropriated, without compensation, for redistribution to black South Africans whose ancestors were dispossessed by the 1913 Natives Land Act <http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/natives-land-act-1913>. When black people lost their land, he said, “poverty set in, because our forebears… [had] led a fulfilled life from the land. They were able to feed their families. And when the removals and dispossession took place, poverty became a partner to the people of our country.”
> 
> The land expropriation resolution was a victory for Dlamini-Zuma’s supporters. Ramaphosa’s own platform on this, South Africa’s tinderbox political issue, was much more moderate: such expropriation could only apply to illegally-acquired land. Now, though, he did a characteristic two-step. He played to the gallery of the comrades who had elected him, but he also used a measured and reasoned tone for the banks, hedge-fund investors, and ratings agencies that hold South Africa’s economy in their hands. Redistribution, he reassured them <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/2017/12/21/decoding-cyril-ramaphosas-speech-take-the-land-but_a_23313883/>, would be done in a way that did not harm the economy, agricultural production, or food security.
> 
> I am not Robert Mugabe, he was saying. This will not be Zimbabwe. Read my book and you will see. My own family knows the pain of dispossession. But I now own the most magnificent herd of cattle in the country, and I am a successful farmer. I have been on both sides. That’s why I can do the job.
> 
> If Ramaphosa is indeed the playmaker and reformer he has claimed to be, he faces his toughest test now, in the days immediately after his victory: what to do about Jacob Zuma. Ramaphosa knows, as do his campaign managers, that if Zuma sees out his term of office, the ANC risks losing power in 2019. Last year, the party lost control of three of South Africa’s biggest cities, including the economic center of Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria, in large part because “clever blacks” had had enough of Zuma.
> 
> Ramaphosa has grounds to move against Zuma. In 2016, the Constitutional Court ruled against Zuma <https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-03-31-nkandla-concourt-ruling-president-zuma-and-national-assembly-in-breach-of-constitution/#.Wj0uBlQ-ei4> for “failure to uphold the Constitution <https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/documents/document/SA-Constitutional-Court-Nkandla-decision.pdf>” by abusing his position over extravagant improvements he had made to his Nkandla homestead. Later that year, Thuli Madonsela, the public protector (a statutory watchdog with judicial powers), announced that there was prima facie evidence of Zuma’s complicity in what became known as the “state capture” <https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-11-02-state-of-capture-report-passing-thuli-madonselas-legacy-to-the-future/#.Wj0uDVQ-ei4> by a business dynasty, the Guptas. Yet Zuma has seemed untouchable: although there are 783 counts of corruption and fraud pending against him <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/2017/09/14/its-been-a-long-road-and-president-jacob-zuma-is-almost-out-of-tricks_a_23209440/>, dating from a 2003 investigation, they have not seen the light of day because he put his cronies in charge of the prosecuting authority. Just two weeks ago, though, a high court in Pretoria gave Ramaphosa a handy weapon <https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-12-08-newsflash-shaun-abrahams-to-vacate-his-position-deputy-president-to-appoint-new-prosecutions-boss-court-rules/#.Wj0uSlQ-ei4>: an order that, because of Zuma’s own conflict of interest, his deputy (in other words, Ramaphosa) was to appoint the new national director of public prosecutions. The new appointee will be the person who decides on whether the case against Zuma is to proceed.
> 
> If Ramaphosa had lost the ANC election to Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Zuma would surely have fired him and appointed another, more compliant deputy (perhaps his ex-wife, indeed). Zuma would most probably have stayed in office for the remainder of his term, and out of jail indefinitely. But Ramaphosa won the party’s mandate, so for political reasons Zuma cannot fire him as deputy president of the country (even though it is technically within his executive authority to do so). The speed with which Ramaphosa selects a new director of prosecutions, and the quality of this appointment, will be one of his first tests.
> 
> There is no question that Ramaphosa and his supporters want Zuma out of office as soon as possible, but there is disagreement in his camp about what to do next. Some want Zuma behind bars, as a sign to South Africans that his kleptocratic era is over, and that the rule of law has been re-established. Others feel that this would be politically imprudent, and they propose striking a deal: if Zuma resigned of his own accord, he could be left in peace.
> 
> The hard truth is that such a deal might be the best outcome South Africans can hope for. Not only was Ramaphosa’s margin of victory in the party leadership election narrow, but the slate of leaders elected alongside him also seems almost evenly divided between his partisans and supporters of the Zumas. Even if a corruption prosecution against Zuma went ahead, Ramaphosa cannot fire the country’s president without majority backing from the party’s 110-member national executive committee. 
> 
> There is no guarantee Ramaphosa would get such support. After this week’s elections, the most powerful man in the party after Ramaphosa is its new secretary-general, Ace Magashule, a Zuma crony deeply compromised by his own relationship with the Gupta family. Magashule has been the regional strongman in the rural Free State province for the past twenty years, and its premier for the past eight: he has run the province badly, but firmly, and built a bulwark of local power. Similar in profile is the man elected as Ramaphosa’s deputy, David “D.D.” Mabuza <https://mg.co.za/article/2017-12-15-00-dd-tactical-genius-or-dark-lord>, who rules the Mpumalanga province with a mix of patronage and thuggishness, and has several allegations of political murder against him.
> 
> Mabuza has showed particular cunning. He built up the party membership in his small home province so that he could bring a large number of delegates to the conference and thus assume the part of kingmaker, <https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/mabuza-holds-race-key-20171203-3> playing both sides in a quest for national power. Although nominated on Dlamini-Zuma’s slate as her deputy, he apparently did a last-minute deal to deliver victory to Ramaphosa.
> 
> Mabuza and Magashule both have their own loyalists in the Zuma administration, senior henchmen who are themselves mired in the Zuma web of corruption. Whether these tainted cabinet ministers make it into a Ramaphosa government—indeed, whether Mabuza himself does, or simply remains a party official and a provincial premier—will indicate how much real power the new ANC president has, and if he is willing wield it. But if party “tradition” continues, and Mabuza slides into place as Ramaphosa’s successor, the worst of the ANC will prevail, and the party will continue its downward trend to defeat and disgrace. Ramaphosa has some herding to do. 
> 
> *******
Mark Gevisser, a South African writer and journalist, is the author of A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream and Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir. 

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http://africanarguments.org/2017/12/19/zuma-vs-ramaphosa-south-africa-now-has-two-centres-of-power/?ct=t(December_29_201712_29_2017)&mc_cid=efd23801cc&mc_eid=f9e43b4167 <http://africanarguments.org/2017/12/19/zuma-vs-ramaphosa-south-africa-now-has-two-centres-of-power/?ct=t(December_29_201712_29_2017)&mc_cid=efd23801cc&mc_eid=f9e43b4167>
> Zuma vs. Ramaphosa: South Africa now has two centres of power
> 
> Cyril Ramaphosa may be the new leader of the ruling party, but Jacob Zuma still controls the state.
> 
BY ROGER SOUTHALL <http://africanarguments.org/author/roger-southall/>  |AFRICAN ARGUMENTS, DECEMBER 19, 2017
> Rumours that President Jacob Zuma has instructed the South African <http://africanarguments.org/category/country/southern/south-africa/> National Defence Force to draw up plans for implementing a state of emergency <https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1756940/sa-presidency-rejects-reports-of-state-of-emergency-regulations-draft/> may or may not be true. Nonetheless they are evidence of South Africa’s current febrile political atmosphere.
> 
> Any assumption that yesterday’s election of Cyril Ramaphosa <http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/cyril-matamela-ramaphosa> as the new leader of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), after winning the race against Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, will place South Africa on an even keel are misplaced. Indeed, the drama may only be beginning.
> 
> It’s useful to look back to 2007 when President Thabo Mbeki unwisely ran for a third term as ANC leader. His unpopularity among large segments of the party provided the platform for his defeat by Zuma at Polokwane. Within a few months, the National Executive Committee of the ANC latched onto an excuse to ask Mbeki to stand down as president of the country before the end of his term. Being committed to the traditions of party loyalty he complied, resigning as president some eight months before the Constitution required him to do so.
> 
> The question this raises is whether South Africa should now expect a repeat performance following the election of a new party leader. Will this lead to an instruction to Zuma to stand down as president of the country? And if it does, will he do what Mbeki did and meekly resign?
> 
> There’s a big difference between the two scenarios: Mbeki had no reason to fear the consequences of leaving office. Zuma, on the other hand, has numerous reasons to cling to power. This is what makes him, and the immediate future, dangerous for South Africa.
> 
> Why Zuma won’t go
> 
> It is not out of the question that Zuma may say to himself, and to South Africa, that he is not going anywhere. He is losing court case <https://theconversation.com/dramatic-night-in-south-africa-leaves-president-hanging-on-by-a-thread-57180> after court case <https://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21732538-judges-keep-finding-against-south-africas-embattled-president-jacob-zuma-loses-two>, and judicial decisions are increasingly narrowing his legal capacity to block official and independent investigations into the extent of state capture <http://ewn.co.za/Topic/State-Capture> by business interests close to him.
> 
> With every passing day, the prospects of his finding himself in the dock, facing 783 charges <https://theconversation.com/president-zuma-loses-bid-to-dodge-783-charges-but-will-he-have-the-last-laugh-85703>, including of corruption and racketeering, also increase.
> 
> Zuma will have every constitutional right to defy an ANC instruction to stand down until his term expires following the next general election in 2019 <https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/newsmaker-2019-elections-results-will-be-credible-20171015-2>. In terms of the Constitution <http://www.treasury.gov.za/legislation/bills/2002/b16.pdf>, his term of office will be brought to an early end only if parliament passes a vote of no confidence or votes that is unfit for office.
> 
> But today’s ANC is so divided that it cannot be assumed that a majority of its MPs would back a motion of no confidence <https://theconversation.com/whats-happening-inside-the-anc-not-parliament-is-key-to-why-zuma-prevails-82399>, even following the election of Ramaphosa <http://allafrica.com/stories/201712040357.html> as the party’s new leader.
> 
> In other words, there is a very real prospect that South Africa will see itself ruled for at least another 18 months or so by “two centres of power” <https://mg.co.za/article/2007-06-27-anc-debates-two-centres-of-power>, with the authority and the legitimacy of the party (formally backing Ramaphosa) vying against that of the state (headed by Zuma).
> 
> Throwing caution to the wind
> 
> As if that is not a sufficient condition for political instability, we may expect that Zuma will continue to use his executive power to erect defences against his future prosecution. He will reckon to leave office only with guarantees of immunity. Until he gets them, Zuma will defy all blandishments to go. And if he does not get what he wants, he may throw caution to the wind and go for broke.
> 
> Hence, perhaps, the possibility that he is prepared to invoke a state of emergency.
> 
> The grounds for Zuma imposing a state of emergency would be specious, summoned up to defend his interests and those backing him. They would be likely to infer foreign interference <https://theconversation.com/as-pressure-mounts-on-south-africas-jacob-zuma-he-blames-an-old-enemy-western-intelligence-agencies-69599> in affairs of state alongside suggestions of white monopoly capital <https://www.iol.co.za/business-report/zuma-again-denounces-the-monopoly-of-white-economic-power-11988619> – that whites as a whole, as well as nefarious others, are conspiring to prevent much-needed radical economic transformation <https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2017-12-15-know-your-candidate-dlamini-zuma-beats-the-ret-drum/>. Present constitutional arrangements would be declared counter-revolutionary <https://theconversation.com/why-south-africans-should-be-worried-by-anc-talk-of-a-colour-revolution-87019> and those defending them doing so only to protect their material interests.
> 
> After a matter of time, such justifications would probably be declared unconstitutional by the judiciary. It is then that there would be a confrontation between raw power and the Constitution. If such a situation should arise, we cannot be sure which would be the winner.
> 
> South Africa’s army
> 
> It is remarkable how little the searchlight that has focused on state capture has rested on the Defence Force. Much attention has been given to how the executive has effectively co-opted the intelligence <https://theconversation.com/leaked-emails-ramaphosas-hypocrisy-on-spying-by-the-south-african-state-83605> and prosecutorial service <http://www.ngopulse.org/article/2016/09/29/political-interference-weakening-rule-law-sa>, as well as how the top ranks of the police have been selected for political rather than operational reasons <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/world/africa/south-africa-police-commissioner-under-investigation-is-suspended.html>.
> 
> It seems to have been assumed that South Africa’s military is simply sitting in the background, observing political events from afar. But is it? Where would its loyalties lie in the event of a major constitutional crisis?
> 
> The danger of the present situation is that South Africa might be about to find out.
> 
> Were the military to throw its weight behind Zuma, the country would be in no-man’s land. Of course, there would be a massive popular reaction with the further danger that the president himself would summon his popular cohorts to “defend the revolution” <https://theconversation.com/anc-military-veterans-and-the-threat-to-south-africas-democracy-76118>.
> 
> And South Africans should not assume that Zuma would be politically isolated. Those who backed Dlamini-Zuma did so to defend their present positions and capacity to use office for personal gain. If they were to rise up, the army would then be elevated to the status of defender of civil order.
> 
> What is certain is that in such a wholly uncertain situation the economy would spiral downwards quickly. Capital would take flight at a faster rate than ever before, employment <http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=10658> would collapse even further, poverty <http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=10334> would become even further entrenched.
> 
> Reasons to be hopeful
> 
> Is all this too extreme a scenario? Hopefully yes. There are numerous good reasons why such a fate will be averted.
> 
> Zuma’s control over the ANC is waning, as is his control over various state institutions, notably the National Prosecuting Authority. And the country has checks and balances in place: there is a vigorous civil society, the judiciary has proved the Constitution’s main defence, and trade unions and business remain influential.
> 
> Even so, it remains the case that what transpires now the ANC’s national conference is over will determine the fate and future of our democracy. South Africa is approaching rough waters, and a Jacob Zuma facing an inglorious and humiliating end to his presidency will be a Jacob Zuma at his most dangerous.
> 
> Roger Southall is a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.  This article was originally published on The Conversation <http://theconversation.com/>. Read the original article <https://theconversation.com/the-anc-has-a-new-leader-but-south-africa-remains-on-a-political-precipice-89248>.
> 
> ***************
SEE ALSO:
The Real News Network
Marikana Massacre Hangs Over South Africa's New Extremely Rich ANC Leader

After a tight race that exposed stark divisions within the party, the African National Congress elected Cyril Ramaphosa, an anti-apartheid crusader, business tycoon, and key suspect in the 2012 Marikana Massacre is positioned to be the country's next president. But will he root out corruption, or is he part of the problem?  Joining The Real News Network to analyze Ramaphosa's rise to power is Glen Ford, editor of The Black Agenda Report and author of the book The Big Lie. Watch video or read transcript here:

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=20744' style='color:#pop1 <http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=20744%27%20style=%27color:#pop1>


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