Ramaphosa’s National Convention: Vanity project or personality cult? - Isaac Mogotsi
Key topics:
National Convention delegates praised Ramaphosa with a cult-like song.
Song signals loyalty, undermining critical assessment of ANC leadership.
Critics warn National Dialogue risks being state-controlled electioneering.
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By Isaac Mpho Mogotsi*
“Little did we suspect that our own people, when they got that chance, would be as corrupt as the apartheid regime. That is one of the things that really hurt us.”
Former President Nelson Mandela, quoted in Robert Guest’s book The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption, and African Lives. (Page 232, Smithsonian Books, 2004).
One of the more cringeworthy and bizarre moments of the recently concluded National Convention convened by President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa was how the delegates, supposedly not drawn from political parties but from civic organisations across the country, rapturously welcomed Ramaphosa when he was called to the podium to address them. To say the welcome was akin to the one normally accorded to rock stars would be an understatement. The University of South Africa (UNISA) hall, which was the venue of the National Convention on Friday and Saturday of last week, erupted, as if on cue, into a pro-Cyril Ramaphosa Sotho song whose lyrics broadly riffed off thus:
“Ramaphosa, we passionately love you
We are one with you
Oh Ramaphosa, we passionately love you
We shall walk with you
Ramaphosa, we shall go with you wherever you go
Oh Ramaphosa, we love you and we shall follow you.”
For those who do not know, this is a song in praise of Cyril Ramaphosa which is normally provocatively bellowed out in ANC meetings and events by Ramaphosa’s ardent sycophants, but which is deeply detested by Ramaphosa’s political foes both within and outside the African National Congress (ANC).
The song can go by any meaning one chooses to attach to it, but can never be considered an appropriate, inclusive and national unity song fit to be sung at the start of a National Convention billed as a launching pad for an all-inclusive National Dialogue, because it is viewed by many within and outside the ANC the same way many now view Hugh Masekela ‘s song Thuma Mina after it was “hijacked” by Ramaphosa when he delivered his first State of the Nation Address to the national parliament six years ago as a herald for his now completely failed, discredited and evidently jettisoned New Dawn promise.
It is one song totally misplaced as an unofficial anthem of a supposed National Convention for a National Dialogue convened by Ramaphosa.
The question is:
If the delegates to the National Convention saw nothing wrong in and are happy with Ramaphosa’s performance as the leader of our democratic Government and State synchronously, as the singing of the pro-Ramaphosa song implies, what were they doing at the National Conference in the first place?
By their singing of that pro-Ramaphosa song, the delegates seemed to be communicating a message to South Africa and the world that:
“National crises? What national crises? Stop complaining, get over yourselves and enjoy life under Ramaphosa. Don’t worry, be happy!”
After all they have declared in song and dance, in public view of South Africa, the rest of Africa and the rest of the world that they will allow nothing to come between them and Ramaphosa, that they will blindly follow him wherever he goes and leads them to and that, in spite of anything, they will continue to passionately love him.
They were in a similar political campaign mood as was DA nominal leader John Steenhuien when addressing 47th USA President Donald J. Trump at the recent USA - SA presidential encounter.
For a few minutes the person directing the opening proceedings at the National Convention, struggled to impose order on the singing delegates to allow for the programme to continue, as they insisted to sing their fawning panegyrics to Ramaphosa, arguably the worst ANC leader to lead South Africa since 1994.
That moment of song and dance at the National Convention was more Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union and North Korea than post-apartheid democratic South Africa.
It felt as if the Ramaphosa Personality Cult was being consecrated in song by the National Convention delegates.
It was totally embarrassing.
With a start in song and dance like that, how does anyone expect the Ramaphosa-led National Dialogue delegates to hold their rulers to account, to be critical and honest in their assessment of the successive governments of the ANC’s performance, of which Ramaphosa has been a key leader since 1994 in various capacities, including as the ANC Secretary General, the Chairman of the Constituent Assembly which drew up the 1996 Constitution, a leading Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) oligarch deployed by the ANC, as the Deputy Chairman of the National Planning Commission (NPC) which produced the failed and failing National Development Plan (NDP) and later as the ANC Deputy President and now President?
After joyously and boisterously singing that pro-Ramaphosa dixie, the National Convention delegates should have backslapped one another, taken selfies with a V-sign and then should have packed their bags, saved us the trouble and headed straight back home, for they had clearly nailed their colours to the Ramaphosa political mast at that point.
If you sing panegyrics to Ramaphosa at the Ramaphosa-convened National Convention or in the future at any of the envisaged National Dialogue events, you rule yourselves out as capable of an honest assessment of how we came to be where we are today as a nation, you prove yourself incapable of holding your rulers to high accountability standards required and demanded in a democracy and you rule yourself incapable of reimagining a better future for South Africa in which the ANC of Ramaphosa will play an increasingly diminishing, marginal and even irrelevant, if not totally non-existent role, as presaged by the outcome of the 2024 national election, after laying to waste the unsurpassed and monumental trust South African voters once placed in the ANC in the last thirty years of, effectively, ANC one-party rule.
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You belong to beerhalls Ramaphosa derided in his speech to the National Convention and not at the National Convention or the National Dialogue.
In a word, you are at the wrong funeral and wasting your tears.
However we should thank the National Convention delegates for singing this pro-Ramaphosa song because at least we know where they stand in our politics, what political side they belong to and have chosen, what we are dealing with here in terms of the National Dialogue convened by Ramaphosa and what foregone political outcome we can expect from the National Dialogue, judging by the singing of that pro-Ramaphosa song.
There is absolutely no way a citizen-led National Convention which was envisaged by the Foundations which first issued the call for the National Dialogue would have erupted in a song in praise of Ramaphosa. In any case the National Convention delegates would not have been permitted by the Foundations to sing the song.
Truth be told, there was a time five years ago when the pro-Ramaphosa national sentiment was in the ascendancy in our country, although some of us were never swept off our feet by it. That was the time of the so-called Ramaphoria.
Hope sprang eternal for Ramaphosa at the time. He could do nothing wrong, apparently.
Of course it was all a mirage.
Things have now decidedly changed and the national sentiment has bitterly soured on Ramaphosa, as frequently and eloquently given free expression to in the weekly newspaper columns of Peter Bruce, the former Editor of Business Day, arguably now the most trenchant, unrelenting and convincing critic of Ramaphosa in the nation.
It is sometimes quite baffling how the Zeitgeist (the defining spirit of the time or period) can change everything in the political universe of democratic South Africa, become the thing that breaks the camel’s back and attaches itself to the most inconspicuous of events to deliver a huge, historic change of political fortunes for individuals and organisations, if not for our entire country.
To crudely paraphrase Vladimir Lenin, the founder of Soviet power, there are times when nothing happens in decades, and there are times when decades happen in weeks.
It was not the controversial GEAR economic programme, nor the Arms Deal, nor his HIV/Aids denialism, nor was it his disastrous quiet Zimbabwe diplomacy that tanked the presidency of Thabo Mbeki. It seemed to have been his inexplicable and inflexible personal desire to vie for a third term as the ANC leader that completely soured the national sentiment on Mbeki, leading finally to his humiliating defeat at the hands of Jacob Zuma at the December 2007 ANC national conference.
It was not the Nkandla upgrades scandal, nor was it the EFF led by Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu in parliament singing #PayBackTheMoney, nor was it the Constitutional Court ruling instructing him to repay the costs associated with upgrades to his Nkandla homestead, nor was it his disastrous military foray into the Central African Republic (CAR) and neither was it his bizarre remarks about HIV/Aids and the shower which tanked the presidency of Jacob Zuma. It seemed to have been a comparatively inconsequential landing of the Gupta wedding team at our premier military airbase in Pretoria, our capital, which soured the national sentiment decisively against Jacob Zuma, resulting in the massive nation-wide #ZumaMustFall campaigns and ultimately to his recall from office by his own party the ANC.
The same inscrutable and mysterious gris-gris, to borrow a Voodoo expression, of the Zeitgeist appear to be now catching up to President Cyril Ramaphosa.
It now sometimes appears like he can’t do anything right, that everything he touches gets profaned, evokes huge national controversy, if not outright disgust and turns into dust.
Or as the Communist Manifesto thundered:
“All that is solid melts into thin air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”
It was not the #CupCake peccadillo media revelations, nor his disastrous bungling of the COVID-19 lockdown regime, (what with its commercial genocide against small businesses in our country, especially in black townships?), nor the Phala Phala American dollars matrass bank scandal and neither was it the Report of the Parliamentary Panel of Experts led by Justice Sandile Ngcobo which found that he had a prima facie case to answer in relation to the Phala Phala scandal which is tanking the presidency of Ramaphosa.
Instead it seems it will be his inexplicable and inflexible personal insistence to go ahead with the National Dialogue controlled by the government he leads, contrary to the wise advice of the Foundations, which will tank the presidency of Ramaphosa.
This is because the Zeitgeist, the national sentiment against Ramaphosa, is now in the ascendancy and is depriving him of his characteristic Teflon cover and Midas touch.
The end is truly nigh.
In this sense the Foundations were vindicated by the delirious singing of the pro-Ramaphosa song at the start of the National Convention last Friday regarding the dangers inherent in a National Dialogue which is controlled by the government.
You may ask:
Why the ballyhoo? What is in the song?
Everything in Africa is in a song.
In Africa’s rich oral traditions, songs have proven to be a powerful cultural instrument in forging people’s views of their surroundings, identities, their friends, their foes, their frenemies, their fellow human beings and their place in the polity they live in. Songs often prove to be the most powerful mobilising and conscientising tool in Africa, especially during political and election campaigns, even more powerful than other marketing and promotional devices and written words of our modern and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered world.
In Africa songs have a powerful magic as they can anoint and confer immortality on mere and flawed mortals.
In African societies, of which democratic South Africa is a part, a song and dance can be everything to do with the exercise of power and influence, the accumulation of resources, or exclusion therefrom.
They thus become a powerful signal about future intent.
They foretell the future as much as they narrate about the past and present.
In Africa songs are not only about the soul. They are equally about our collective state of mind.
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I am sure it will not be the last time we witness the stomach churning pro-Ramaphosa hagiography on display through songs at the National Dialogue events.
If the delegates to the National Convention could engage in such an open and shameless political and cultural deification of Cyril Ramaphosa in full view of the public, just imagine what will happen when the proceedings of the National Dialogue take place in wards across the country and are not beamed live.
The singing of that song in glorification of Ramaphosa at the start of the National Convention confirms the worst fears about the National Dialogue amongst a considerable number of South Africans that the National Dialogue is nothing but a State-sponsored electioneering ploy to advantage the weakened ANC, which Ramaphosa leads, out of depth, out of touch with the electorate and in short supply of resources, in preparation for the 2026 local government election (LGE) of next year.
What few grasp but the ANC fully understands is that local government elections have acted as the canary in mine for the ANC since it lost Cape Town to the Democratic Alliance (DA) in March 2006, even more than the national elections, because the failures of ANC governments have historically been felt most acutely at local level.
Unsurprisingly Ramaphosa did not rebuke the delegates for singing fawning praises to him in the way former President Kgalema Motlanthe once called to order a packed stadium of his ANC supporters in Polokwane singing praises to him ahead of the December 2012 Mangaung ANC national conference.
If anything Ramaphosa basked in the five-minute jarring adulation and beamed his usual mischievous and self-indulgent Cheshire cat grin of complete approval.
This was a classic case of ancient Roman Emperor Nero playing fiddle whilst Rome burnt in 64 CE.
How come the delegates to the National Convention could not once find it in themselves to at least sing a song in praise of say Nelson Mandela, the founder of democratic South Africa and one towering political figure broadly enjoying national consensus as having embodied the best of our national values and characteristics, you may be tempted to ask?
Why sing a song to a failing and deeply flawed Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa who admitted in public at the Zondo State Capture Commission that he leads the ANC that is “Corruption Accused Number One,” that State Capture happened under his and former President Jacob Zuma’s watch during what he termed “Nine Wasted Years” and that he did nothing to oppose the ruinous State Capture because he feared that Jacob Zuma would fire him from the national Cabinet as his Deputy President, that he basically admitted that he prioritised his personal interests to remain in the Cabinet above the national interest to call out State Capture at that most inconvenient and perilous for him moment and that thus he is not a man ready to sacrifice for his convictions against corruption?
Even John Steenhuisen, the nominal leader of the DA and now the Minister of Agriculture in Ramaphosa’s Government of National Unity (GNU), made bold to state on 30 January last year in an online Politicsweb article that corruption has become worse under the presidency of Ramaphosa than it was under former president Jacob Zuma, who in public perceptions is viewed, possibly unfairly with hindsight, as being synonymous with State-level corruption in the post-apartheid era.
What is clear though is that delegates to the recently concluded National Convention failed to face with sober senses their conditions of life and their relations with their own kind in the person of President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, to paraphrase Karl Marx and Frederich Engels.
Instead in their pro-Ramaphosa song and dance, these National Convention delegates chose to be fabulists like ancient Greece’s Aesop and endlessly argued about who amongst them would be brave enough to identify and hoist a bell around an ANC political cat’s neck, whilst the cat continues to devour them one by one.
It truly boggles the mind.
It would be funny if it were not so tragic and consequential.
*Isaac Mpho Mogotsi Historian, Businessman, former Freedom Fighter, former Teacher, former Diplomat, Economic Diplomat and Award-Winning author of the novel The Alexandra Tales (Ravan Press, 1995) and the self-published book Whispering against the Wind: Democratic South Africa’s Search for National Identity, 2011 – 2022 (CEDIA Publications, 2024).
Founder & Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)