Isaac Mogotsi pt. 4: Inside the GNU built to save Ramaphosa, not South Africa

Key topics:GNU seen as a fragile, unpopular alliance between ANC and DARamaphosa-Zille pact marks end of ANC's dominant political eraSA faces urgent need for new, younger leadership.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Isaac Mogotsi*.Introduction.“I don’t believe we need weak coalitions like in Italy.” ANC & COPE stalwart and BEE business tycoon Saki Macozoma, interviewed by Mail & Guardian, 09 March 2009.“Democratic Alliance (DA) federal chairperson Helen Zille has admitted that her party prioritised business interests. She said the DA was instructed by business to protect President Cyril Ramaphosa from the Economic Freedom Fighters.” IOL article, 04 November 2024.“The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Plato, ancient Greek philosopher.Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, the leader of the African National Congress (ANC) and our State President and Helen Zille, the leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA)’s Federal Council, are currently South Africa’s leading septuagenarian political voices. Born in the turbulent early 1950s, their birthdays separated by just over one year, the two political leaders, previously also separated by apartheid’s racial laws, find themselves brought together by the electoral fate of the 2024 election outcome to collaborate closely and to politically, if also clumsily, tango as two foremost architects of South Africa’s embarrassing, shambolic, fumbling, wobbly, exclusionary, divisive and very painfully disunited Government of National Unity (GNU) which was forged between the ANC and the DA, first and foremost, following last year’s watershed election and which includes other political bit players for indoor plastic flower optics.The two prominent political personalities are also in the twilight years of their commanding political influence after decades of political activism. Their fast fading political influence represents a remarkable decline in the fortunes of the septuagenarian and octogenarian, or rather the pensioner generation of political leaders and activists like former presidents Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Kgalema Motlanthe and opposition figures like Tony Leon who spearheaded South Africa’s political transition in the early 1990s and the building of our democratic and constitutional framework following the collapse of racist white rule in 1994.A massive generational leadership change and baton passing are on offer in South Africa. It is in many ways South Africa’s epochal moment coinciding with and triggered by our unprecedented 2024 election. The sun is setting on a generation that ushered in South Africa’s democracy and laid the foundation for our post-apartheid constitutional State.South Africa’s national political leadership matrix will look decidedly different in five to ten years from now, thanks to this generational change of guard as momentous as when black rulers replaced racist white rulers in 1994. The difference is that in 1994 there was tremendous national hope which pervaded the air, whereas now there is growing and palpable foreboding about what may be in store ahead.And the chaotic and divided GNU is not proving to be a good harbinger of such a stable future. A new, younger and much more ambitious crop of political leaders of South Africa which will carry the fate of our country in the next thirty to forty years is eagerly waiting in the wings, with some visible impatience and chest-thumbing, and will soon emerge to take over and replace these two septuagenarians and the visibly exhausted pensioner generational elites they represent which wielded massive and outsized political and economic influence in the last three decades of our democracy, is now obsessed more with their pension nests and their personal political legacies but which has now clearly run out of new, creative and energising ideas to take our country to the next, higher plane of socio-economic development.This pensioner generation has very little new and uplifting to offer our country.As we say in black township lingua, shem…they are tired.And South Africa is collectively hankering after and hungry for such a generational change of guard.The old is fading but the new has not yet asserted itself. It’s an interregnum, with all its morbid political symptoms like the 2024 Government of National Unity (GNU).The leading Singaporean geopolitical strategist, former diplomat and influential author Kishore Mahbubani in an interview with Al Jazeera TV’s #Bottomline program on 19 April this year stated that in the last four decades of its economic reform China moved its economy from being ten times less than the economy of the European Union (EU) in 1990 to near parity with EU economy today. He described the current population of China as the richest in China’s 5 000 year history. He also said that China moved from being a poor developing country in 1980 to now being the world’s second biggest and highly sophisticated economy, the world’s biggest manufacturing platform which enjoys a huge trade surplus with the trading world and possessing of a highly complex and deep technological base.All this incredible economic progress China achieved within a space of just one post-Chinese Cultural Revolution generation.Unfortunately South Africa’s soon-to-fade septuagenarian and octogenarian leadership cohort has dismally failed to match our great democratic and constitutional advances of the 1990s with similar economic progress within one post-apartheid and #BornFree generation.South Africa’s very poor, disheartening and disappointing economic performance in the last three decades of our democracy and constitutional order is an indictment on the collective ruling elite class of our country in politics, economy, academia, NGOs, traditional healing and in the faith realm.It is nothing short of a national scandal.A fascinating article by Zhang Wenmu, one of China’s key contemporary social and political commentators, appeared on his Wechat public account under the title “Some Reflections on China’s Future as the Russia – Ukraine War draws to a close” on 04 March 2025. In the article Wenmu poses a critical question as to whether the current prosperous younger generation of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese, who have been enriched and hugely benefited from China’s phenomenal rise as a global economic superpower, has the strategic depth and refined political skills possessed by Chinese leaders like President Xi Jinping who were tempered by the Cultural Revolution’s Down to the Countryside Movement, a movement which deployed Chinese Communist Party cadres and urban intellectuals to China’s rural hinterland in order for them to learn life lessons, life skills and leadership theory and practice from ordinary, often very poor rural Chinese. Wenmu expressed doubt that the younger generation growing up under these unprecedented conditions of national prosperity, stability and unprecedented global influence of China has what it takes to keep China’s phenomenal economic progress on course in the future.South Africa too needs to ask herself the same question as to whether the next younger as well as #BornFree generational leadership cohort which will soon take over reigns from the current older, tired and pensioner national leadership cohort has the mettle to continue to maintain the country’s democratic order, stability and growing global influence, whilst addressing key national challenges woefully neglected by the older, fatigued generation at the exit door and departure lounges of their lives during the past three decades, such as the land reform stalemate, exploding youth unemployment, anaemic economic growth, rising criminality, gender-based violence, growing racial tensions fuelled by external players, the glaring lack of economic justice for all and the growing and generalised anomie in our post-apartheid society. To put it bluntly, China forewent the trappings and niceties of western liberal democracy and constitutional façade of Roman-Dutch law for rapid economic growth and an economic lift-off powered by massive western investments in the last four decades of economic reform under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which lifted over eight hundred million Chinese out of deep Cultural Revolution-era poverty and stagnation, whilst South Africa, under a multi-party democratic system led by the ANC and liberal Constitution pioneered by Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa-chaired Constituent Assembly and heralded as so-called “the best” in the world, but which no other country is eager to emulate, chose the trappings of a western liberal democracy and constitutional façade based on the Roman-Dutch law but failed dismally to attract investments from the West at scale, not even at a lowest fraction of what China achieved to do in the last four decades.[In passing, it is relevant to train our eyes on an important academic and intellectual event that took place in the life of the United States of America (USA) in the last decade. I am referring here to an article by Sheri Berman titled “Populism is a problem, Elitist Technocrats aren’t the Solution”, which appeared in Foreign Policy magazine on 20 December 2017, meaning the day the Nasrec 2017 ANC national conference which elected Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa as a leader closed.In the article Sheri Berman makes the point that America was more equal as a slave-owning society than it is today as a democratic and constitutional society and the wealthiest country in the entire world brimming with the largest number of billionaires in history. I shall return to her article later on in this article.]How did such contrasts between China and South Africa in terms of inward western investment flows happen?Why didn’t western countries back their effusive and rhetorical praises for our democratic transition and for Nelson Mandela as a Reconciliation Statesman and global icon with commensurate investment in our economy, at least proportionally to what they invested in China run by the Chinese Communist Party, in order to assist to power our economic growth rates upward?In a Chairman’s Conversation with Power FM founder Given Mkhari in 2018 Richemont CEO Johann Rupert, dubbed Africa’s second richest man, admitted that for no good reason whatsoever local big business held back and did not invest in South Africa at scale as it should have during the administration of former president Thabo Mbeki, an administration Rupert strangely lauded, thus making it clear that even an administration run by an intelligent and competent black person like former president Thabo Mbeki is not guaranteed massive investment inflows by local and western money bags, unlike China under a Chinese government run by the Chinese Communist Party.No “the best Constitution in the world” and “rainbow nation miracle” mantra ensured that there was massive western investment into South Africa in the last thirty years. If Nelson Mandela, the darling of the West and a global icon, failed to loosen the investment purses of western investment money bags, who amongst our past leaders could have and who amongst the current and future leaders will be able to?There in is an object and seminal lesson for the younger generation of leaders about to don the leadership crown of our country. It is therefore very crucial to try to understand the influence the two septuagenarians (Ramaphosa and Zille) in particular have had on our recent lives in order better to appreciate what South Africa they and their fatigued, older pensioner generation are leaving behind for the younger generation to inherit and what choices and tasks lie ahead.[In parenthesis it needs to be stated that it’s baffling indeed that when Africa, South Africa included, carries the world’s biggest youth bulge, when youth activism and revolt are on the rise across Africa in countries like Kenya, Niger, Nigeria and Gabon, when African countries like Senegal, Botswana, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Lesotho, Gabon and Burundi are led by relatively young leaders and when South Africa is experiencing horrific levels of youth unemployment and poverty, we see it fit as a country to vest the responsibility for fashioning our post-2024 election future to these two septuagenarians who may not be politically active as national leaders for long enough to see such a future eventuate in say three to four decades from now.]Are the beautiful ones not yet born, to paraphrase the title of a famous book?In his Scientific Autobiography the great German physicist and the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Max Planck remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”For his part the jailed former Pakistan prime minister and world-famous cricketer Imran Khan once remarked that he had to go through a losing streak in several elections before winning and obtaining the democratic mandate to lead his country’s government. He said that he did so knowing that he would lose them because he was aware that a new and younger generation in Pakistan had not yet be born or grown up to embrace his political message and elect him to lead his country’s government. Cometh the man but not the hour, so to speak.Ramaphosa and Zille through their cantankerous and ugly GNU have been tasked by fate and history to switch off the lights and bring down the curtains on the outgoing pensioner generation so clearly lacking in vim and vigour.What kind of political legacy will these two septuagenarians leave behind when they will soon, thanks God, depart the political stage to allow for new truths and a younger generational leadership cohort to emerge?Will the formation and operation of GNU represent their crowning political glory? Will such a departure allow emergent new truths to be embraced by the younger generation in order to replace the discredited neoliberal mantras and governing praxis which held sway for the last three decades? Will the new generations embracing new truths view GNU as a political necessity? Or will they view it as an aberration, or as a poisoned chalice, or as an avoidable political and transactional deal-making? Or will they view it as a betrayal and a political snake oil concoction of desperate political party elites humiliated and humbled by voters in the 2024 election?Wikipedia states that “the term snake oil has since been established in popular culture as a reference to any worthless concoction sold as medicine, and has been extended to describe a wide-ranging degree of fraudulent goods, services, ideas and activities such as worthless rhetoric in politics.”Is GNU another example of “a worthless rhetoric in politics”, of a snake oil concoction?In the preceding PARTS ONE and TWO of this article I sought to convincingly argue that South Africa’s big white business is the biggest behind-the-scenes driver of and beneficiary from the political snake oil concoction called GNU pioneered by Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa and Otta Helen Zille.How come even their grotesque GNU, nearly a year on, has too dismally failed to induce western countries and their money bags to pour massive investments, at scale, into our anaemic economy, whilst western leaders of the European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan and New Zealand are so full of praise for and hosanna singing to this strange governance placeholder in our country?CYRIL RAMAPHOSA AND GNU: THE LAST, DESPERATE THROW OF THE DICE BY A BLACK ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT (BEE) OLIGARCH?“We have a president who has money, who’s wealthy, who will not be tempted to steal…He is the president of the ANC. He is wealthy, he is rich. If he steals, we will ask him why do you steal (sic), because you have enough?’” ANC Chairman Gwede Mantashe on newly elected ANC president Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa (first term), quoted by Mondli Makhanya, City Press Editor in Chief, City Press, 11 January 2018, meaning full four years before the Phala Phala scandal which rocked and engulfed Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa and nearly brought his Presidency down.Few months before Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa was elected Jacob Zuma’s deputy by the December 2012 ANC national conference in Mangaung, Free State, a position that pole-positioned and later catapulted him to succeed Jacob Zuma, I wrote an article I titled “Will Ramaphosa become our next president?” which appeared in The Thinker magazine. (See The Thinker, Volume 44).In that article I made certain observations about Ramaphosa which are worth revisiting in light of the formation of post-2024 election GNU.I stated that Ramaphosa would not rest until he became ANC and South Africa’s president. This has now come to pass. I also asked whether Ramaphosa will become another crooked beam once installed in the presidential office. The jury is still out on this one, given the ham-fisted way some of the investigations into the Phala Phala scandal were handled. I also quoted Ramaphosa biographer Anthony Butler revealing in the biography that Ramaphosa enjoyed “white paternalism” of the wealthy big white capital titans like the Minell family, Dolowitz and Frankel earlier in his life. I also asked whether Ramaphosa, once he became president, would “for a change become a chancer for our common good, which is our country’s bright future, and not for his business self-interest and political ego.” In another, subsequent article under the heading “Julius Malema: Is a second coming possible?”, which appeared on the online Politicsweb site on 04 March 2012, also before Ramaphosa was elected Jacob Zuma’s deputy by the 2012 Mangaung ANC national conference, I made some passing but not to say incoherent, invalid and unrelated observations about Cyril Ramaphosa.In the article I drew from some incisive political observations which were made by the South African journalist Alan Fine, formerly the deputy editor at Business Day, in a Business Day article which appeared under the title “ANC’s populist faction waiting in the wings.”It is worth quoting a bit from what I wrote more than twelve years ago with regard to Cyril Ramaphosa so as to better assess and politically judge the GNU government he formed with Helen Zille and which he leads.I wrote:“In his Business Day article of 26 January 1995, hardly a year after SA’s first democratic elections, Fine penned an article of amazing journalistic power and rare political and intellectual prophetic insight which helps us even today to fully understand ‘the rough justice’ treatment meted out by the ANC NDC under the leadership of Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa to the ‘expelled’ ANCYL president Julius Malema, despite appearances of procedural fairness.”I further wrote:“…Fine said that this particular ANC faction was then led by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Peter Mokaba, Rocky Malebane-Metsing and General Bantu Holomisa. In opposition to this group was the anti-populist faction led by Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa and other former UDF leaders…Over the next several years the real policy conflicts within the ANC are going to be between the populists and those who propagate what might be called social market policies while recognising the constraints imposed by the need to create an international economy.”The last thirty years of ANC’s rule have completely vindicated Alan Fine’s political prophecy about internal ANC factional dynamics in which Cyril Ramaphosa has played one of the commanding roles, especially at the 2017 Nasrec ANC national conference, where he emerged, with massive help of big white business donations to his #CR17campaign, victorious by a waifer thin margin, barely edging out Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to claim the then (but no more) much coveted presidential crown of the ANC.And over the past thirty years Ramaphosa has stoically remained the ANC’s representative embodiment of and a shining metonym for the ultimate ANC Anti-Populist, arguably the most important and consequential constant of his long and meandering political career which has made him hugely popular and attractive to white big capital domestically and to international big capital in general and now to Helen Zille’s DA, but much less so to the increasingly restive, highly sophisticated and discerning black voters, as the election of last year amply demonstrated.Hardly possessing oodles of personal charisma, not known for rhetorical flourishes which move men and their emotions, never seeming to act on impulse, always displaying a studied control of his language, facial expressions and bodily gestures, looking like he revels in his boring and ponderous speech delivery, never once to erupt in public anger like Nelson Mandela occasionally did or in a song and dance at the slightest urging like former president Jacob Zuma did and ever careful not to pen a weighty tome containing his thoughts, never accused of coming up with an original idea of his own, he is nevertheless very reassuring to the worried and occasionally fearful big white business community in particular and to white South Africa in general. He strikes both as the ultimate antonym to an angry, revolutionary and radical black leader like Julius Malema or even lesser so to Jacob Zuma. He delivers stability, certainty and calmness to them. He seems to be their chosen black darling. Even when he signs into law bills which unsettles them psychologically, they somehow convince themselves that they do not reflect who Ramaphosa truly is and so time after time they give him a free pass, unendingly so.Put simply, without big white business opening its huge purses to support Ramaphosa’s #CR2017campaign with what others claim was over R1 billion, and Ramaphosa alleges is about R350 million, Ramaphosa could not have conceivably defeated Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma at the 2017 Nasrec ANC national conference and would not have ended up ascending to be our State President. That’s how crucial and critical has been the big white business ‘support for him.And this has really been Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa’s true powerbase throughout the many ANC factional skirmishes he engaged in or was drawn into or swept over by since the great mineworkers’ strike he led against Anglo-American in the 1980s.Lastly, I then wrote the following, also still relevant to any assessment of Ramaphosa with regard to the genesis of the powerful political factors which necessitated the formation of GNU:“The anti-populists, others call them neoliberals or Thatcherites or rightwingers or puppets of the West or lackeys of domestic big white capital and of multinationals, will continue to say the same trivia, even after donkeys’ years, unless and until the ANC ‘populist faction’ amass sufficient momentum to politically gain a decent short at national political power and governance.”This I wrote more than twelve years ago.There is no doubt in my mind that the formation of post-2024 GNU between the ANC and the DA is the outcome of the machinations and conniving by the anti-populist faction of the ANC now led by Ramaphosa and which, as Alan Fine put it thirty years ago, is constituted by “those who propagate what might be called social market policies” and who recognise “the constraints imposed by the need to create an international economy.”Ramaphosa led this faction with gusto in ideological battles with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and others in the 1990s and now leads it even more passionately in the “toenadering” with Otta Helen Zille’s DA in GNU.The spectacular performance of formerly ANC populist faction, or the so-called Radical Economic Transformation (RET) ANC faction, in the form of former president Jacob Zuma-led MKP in the last election validates the prophecy I made and is the singular most important cause and raison d’etre for the formation of GNU by Ramaphosa and Helen Zille, under the tutelage of big white business in our country, as Helen Zille has openly and frequently admitted in public and as she was quoted in so many words by IOL of 04 November 2024. (See IOL quote above.)Thirty years on Ramaphosa is still battling to keep the populists, whether Julius Malema’s EFF or Jacob Zuma’s MKP or Solly Mapaila-led faction of the SACP, from the levers of national power in South Africa, to the extent that he prefers to, in the words of businessman Bonang Mohale, go into bed “with our former colonisers” in GNU, such as the DA and the Freedom Front Plus.We should also keep in mind as we move along what the great German revolutionary poet Bertolt Brecht described as “…the worst thieves of them all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of national and multinational companies.” [Wink…wink… the 2012 Marikana massacre.]As fate would have it, just under two years before he steps down as the leader of the ANC, assuming he is not recalled before the end of his second term as the ANC leader, I am able to assess how Ramaphosa’s political legacy with regard to GNU will most likely impact on our country in general, on the ANC in particular and especially on his political legacy going forward.On his book The ANC Billionaires: Big Capital’s Gambit and the Rise of the Few (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2022) the journalist and author Pieter du Toit used the faces of Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, Patrice Motsepe, Saki Macozoma and Tokyo Sexwale to illustrate the front cover. The title and cover of the book leaves little to imagination that the author views these four as representative of a handful of overnight super rich black individuals, the few connected, the “ANC billionaires”, as he puts it, whose fortunes have risen beyond their wildest dreams thanks to big capital’s gambit. They belong to South Africa’s exclusive billionaire class (the wealthiest 1% of our society) and owe their emergence in business and their overnight stupendous wealth primarily, if not exclusively, to their close, monopolised and exclusionary proximity to big capital, as Du Toit calls it, or what in radical political circles is interchangeably called either big white business or white monopoly capital (WMC). Du Toit pertinently devotes a whole chapter of his book to Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa which he titled “The new Randlord,” stating that this neologism was coined and used precisely to refer to Ramaphosa, an apt reminder of Franz Fanon aphorism that the dream which animates the colonised man is to be like the coloniser, to take over from the coloniser and even to hop into bed with the coloniser’s wife.The original white Randlords were the super wealthy mining families which literally owned South Africa’s mining-based economy under colonialism and apartheid.The dream which animates our own BEE oligarchs is to wield the same economic and political power and influence which the original Randlords under colonialism and apartheid wielded, to live in ostentatious opulence like them and to embody inequality and class distinctions as the original Randlords did.In Marxist jargon, the expropriated has become the expropriator! [It’s not clear why Du Toit put Tokyo Sexwale ‘s face on his book’s front cover yet out of the four “ANC billionaires” did not devote a chapter to him, but did so to Vusi Khanyile, another ANC big businessman whose face is not on the front cover. Sloppy proofreading perhaps?]Pieter du Toit unflinchingly demonstrates how these super wealthy black business tycoons he calls “ANC billionaires” are the product of South Africa’s white big business’s gambit to curry favours with the ruling ANC, a point shared most intensely amongst South Africa’s vocal radical circles.The astonishing thing this book reveals is not just the genesis of the dreamland super wealth these connected black individuals amassed overnight since the dawn of our democracy thanks to white big business’ gambit, but also, tellingly, how some of the major players of the same white big business harbour what are frankly astonishingly condescending and demeaning views and opinions about some of these “ANC billionaires.”A case in point is of course Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, our State President, the co-anchor of GNU as well as the outgoing leader of the fast diminishing and washed up ANC. Some of the most acerbic comments, caustic remarks, unflattering opinions, remorseless takedowns and weathering criticism in Pieter du Toit’s book are reserved by the tippy top captains of white big capital for no other than Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa.At the 2018 South Africa Investment Conference and echoing Jack Ma, the Chinese business titan and Alibaba founder, Ramaphosa called on South Africans to regard entrepreneurs as “heroes.”[Two years after making this bizarre statement calling on South Africans to regard entrepreneurs as “heroes”, which statement was uncritically echoed by Ramaphosa at the same event, Jack Ma’s tjatjaraag business wings were clipped by the powerful Chinese Communist Party government in Beijing and he subsequently and literally vanished from public view for years. On the other hand, Ramaphosa went on to get himself elected as president of South Africa in 2019 and subsequently unfurled his rabidly pro-business agenda on the national stage.] But from the pages of Pieter du Toit’s book emerges a disturbing picture drawn by some leading lights in South Africa’s big white corporate world who harbour pretty much off-colour perceptions about Ramaphosa, certainly not returning the compliment and viewing him as “a hero,” but instead portraying him more like a rather self-interested, indecisive, untalented, uninspiring, spineless, unimaginative, mediocre, fair weather and even non-suave, if not wooden, sophomore villain seeking to play in the tippy top postgraduate team of big business. From the get-go and as early as in the introduction of his book Du Toit quotes the late Michael Spicer, a former leading executive at Anglo America, former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA), which brings together representatives of South Africa’s blue chip companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), and a white big business titan in his own right saying the following about Ramaphosa:“Describing Ramaphosa as ‘not a conviction politician’, Spicer added, ‘The trouble with him is that he believes in leading from behind, and our problems don’t allow for a gradualist approach. But that’s the guy’s nature; he’s not a get-out-ahead, decisive sort of guy.” (Page xxvii).Quoting Bobby Godsell, another big white business titan, the former CEO of Anglo Gold, former chairman of BLSA and Ramaphosa’s counterpart at Anglo American in negotiations between the company and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in the 1980s, who knows Ramaphosa pretty well, Du Toit writes:“Godsell was, however, critical of both the approach by established business in the 1990s, and the recipients of BEE deals, and said no real transfer of wealth took place – and that, in fact, only a narrow band of connected individuals were enriched.” (Page 181).Ramaphosa is of course one of the biggest recipients of BEE deals Godsell was mercilessly critiquing.Godsell’s observation was a rare but welcomed moment of white big business’ candour about the economic deceit represented by Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) designed in the boardrooms of white big business to compromise, corral in and tether a handful of ANC leaders to the cause of least transformation of South Africa’s economic and land ownership patterns, which candour is completely absent in the “ANC billionaires” and other major black beneficiaries of BEE in the big white business world. “ANC billionaires” and other beneficiaries of BEE in the white corporate world would have us believe that their overnight stupendous wealth is solely the result of their incredible smarts, legendary business acumen, unmatched networking brilliance, some mythical power they alone possessed to persuade established big white businesses to part with a chunk of their business wealth, their inbred capitalist deal-making genius, or some such ill-defined, esoteric personal qualities and abilities apparently absent in the rest of the black community in South Africa not in close proximity to big white business.They apparently fancy themselves to be alone in possession of some luck that somehow locate them magically to the scene where white big business give part of their wealth to a few chosen black people.Saki Macozoma, one of the “ANC billionaires” on the front cover of Pieter du Toit’s book, was once quoted by Patrick Wadula as stating that “…there is a lack of credible black partners that can add value to black economic empowerment opportunities in business.” (AllAfrica online site & Business Day, 20 July 2004.)On what empirical evidence did Macozoma arrive at such a self-anointing and completely strange conclusion?The famous Israeli Jewish-American author and psychologist Daniel Kahneman had a term for this type of nonsensical self-perception as expressed by Saki Macozoma. He called it “the illusion of validity”. Others may perhaps choose to refer to it as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Or maybe even refer to it as a confabulation of the Korsakoff syndrome variety.This is the same Saki Macozoma about whom Barry Sergeant in his biography Brett Kebble: The Inside Story wrote that “Kebble fervently believed , and said so many times, that Macozoma had orchestrated a conspiracy against Jacob Zuma with a view to becoming the next president of South Africa.” (Zebra Press, 2006, page 286.)Looks like all “ANC billionaires” at one point or another in the post-1994 history of the ANC harboured or continue to harbour presidential ambitions. However as Pieter du Toit demonstrates in his book, nothing could be further from the truth in terms of the highly exaggerated sense of self-importance the black BEE tycoons and “ANC billionaires” have about themselves, as if they are “self-made” when they are in fact the products of big white capital’s gambit.But has big white capital’s gambit and BEE benefited the general black community?Bobby Godsell correctly indicated that “no real wealth transfer took place - and that, in fact, a narrow band of connected individuals were enriched” with regard to BEE designed in big white corporations’ boardrooms.Black communities across our country were and still are left as impoverished as before under apartheid and colonialism. The elite BEE project designed by Ramaphosa’s BEE Commission of 1998 under the government of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki left behind these tens of millions of dirt poor black South Africans, many of them now reliant on a R350 special emergency relief grant per month for survival, whilst the BEE oligarchs live the life not much unlike the lives of ancient and corrupt French Emperors.It’s utterly obscene and unconsionable.In any normal democratic country, this revelation by Bobby Godsell would cause a huge public outcry and even lead to a re-enactment of the #ZumaMustFall and #SaveSA sponsored mass civil campaigns of 2014 – 2016. Not so in South Africa under Ramaphosa, where we are called to regard these few connected BEE oligarchs, amongst others, as “heroes” and where the leader of the second biggest parliamentary party openly admits that she has been instructed by big business to defend Ramaphosa, and not the ANC he leads.It is rather very strange that the South African public seems to think that this form of rotten-to-the-core and narrow-based BEE designed in white big business boardrooms is a lesser evil that the so-called State Capture under former president Jacob Zuma.However for some this narrow-based BEE and the so-called State Capture are much of a muchness, if not six of this and half a dozen of that. They both deserve our collective and equal opprobrium, because both, like colonial and apartheid systems before, enrich only a select few, or as Bobby Godsell put it, a narrow band of connected individuals, including either Jacob Zuma’s buddies the Guptas or Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa and other BEE tycoons, respectively.Those who opposed the so-called State Capture but support and gain from narrow-based BEE are deeply dishonest and self-enriching, just as those who supported the so-called State Capture but oppose rotten-to-the-core and narrow-based BEE are. Whether green or red, a rotten apple remains a rotten apple.But Godsell was not done with Pieter du Toit in the confessional, metaphorically speaking.Du Toit further quoted Bobby Godsell as stating about BEE that:“That form of ownership was ‘phoney’”, Godesell said, “because it was achieved without risk to the owners. And it means that owners can’t do the central thing they have to in a market economy, and that is live through the bad times as well as the good, and invest in the growth of the business.” (Ibid).What Godsell was saying was that narrow-based BEE which benefited a few connected (mostly ANC) individuals such as Ramaphosa was a political and not appropriate economic incentive which was in bad faith and de-risked and thus introduced a massive distortion in the market economy of South Africa.For such connected few individuals, the good times just kept rolling with no end and no risk, without the BEE beneficiaries ever breaking a sweat, except maybe to attend board meetings here and there.Godsell then pointedly asked Du Toit the following revealing question about Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, with whom he once served as a fellow Commissioner in the National Planning Commission (NPC) under former Minister Trevor Manuel in Jacob Zuma’s Presidency to develop the National Development Plan (NDP) adopted in 2012:“I mean how often do you think Cyril Ramaphosa has put his hand in his pocket to invest in businesses that he owns?” (Ibid)It is a million dollar question still relevant to this day.For Bobby Godsell BEE is phoney, carried no risk to its beneficiaries and did not transfer any wealth whatsoever.In other words, if Bobby Godsell is interpreted correctly, the whole BEE scheme was just one gigantic fraud, in a layman’s term. Incredible stuff given that the guidelines for the establishment of BEE was produced by a BEE Commission chaired by Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, Bobby Godsell’s close acquaintance, if not a bosom buddy, of many decades.There is an important sense in which former president Thabo Mbeki and president Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, then the chairman of the BEE Commission (1998 -2003), can rightly be considered the political godfathers of BEE, the political fibroid which led to the ideological uterine distortion that gave rise to what is commonly referred to as democratic South Africa’s original corruption sin, the Arms Deal of December 1999. (See Andrew Feinstein’s book After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside The ANC, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2007, and also see Metji Makgoba’s SABINET piece under the title The Neoliberal Logic of Thabo Mbeki’s Black Economic Empowermenrt in South Africa and Corporate Media Discourse, Vol. 57, No.3 of 01 September 2022.)Bobby Godsell was in fact echoing, almost word for word, a view earlier expressed by the author William Mervin Gumede in an article under the title “Down to business, but nothing to show,” which appeared in the book Thabo Mbeki’s World: The Politics and Ideology of the South African President (Edited by Sean Jacobs & Richard Calland, University of Natal Press, 2002.)Gumede stated that “…many supposed BEE companies are little more than facades. While blacks typically serve as non-executive directors, whites hold top executive jobs, and also control operations and management. Examples abound of black businessmen who rent their faces to white businesses so that the latter can satisfy the requirements for government tenders.” (Page209.)Incredible stuff this too. If Bobby Godsell and William Mervin Gumede are right in their characterisation of BEE, how come Saki Macozoma was once of the view that “…there is a lack of credible black partners that can add value to black economic empowerment opportunities in business”?What value add was Macozoma referring to? From what William Mervin Gumede alleged, all a connected black person like Saki Macozoma needed to possess and value add to qualify to benefit from a BEE deal in the white big corporate world was the colour of his face!BEE companies are facades? Non-executive black directors in white companies have no power? Black businessmen rent their faces to white businesses so that the latter can illegally and fraudulently game the BEE legal regime to fraudulently gain government tenders? And we call this “BEE economic transformation”?Is this any different from post-Communist Russia’s robber capitalism under Boris Yeltsyn which gave rise to extremely rapacious, super wealthy and infamous Russian oligarchs?For her part Helen Zille, Ramaphosa’s co-anchor in the post-2024 election GNU, had this to say about BEE in her book Not Without a Fight: The Autobiography:“Our current law legalises corruption, as long as it is covered with a BEE fig leaf, however flimsy…Since our transition to democracy, big business has bought favour from the ANC elite to the tune of R500 billion in share-transfer deals, thus complying with the legal requirement of ‘black economic empowerment’…Over time, the elite enrichment project was exposed for what it was, and the debate moved towards changing it into broad-based economic empowerment (BBBEE).” (Penguin Books, 2016, pages 377 – 378.)Where did the R500 billion disappear into when the vast majority of black people are left to continue to live the lives of destitution which leaves them alive simply because they have not died yet?Earlier in the book Zille had described a BEE deal involving Gold Fields and politically connected persons like Gayton MacKenzie, another bit but garrulous and attention-seeking player in GNU representing the unpatriotic Patriotic Front, as well as the former Speaker of the parliament Baleka Mbete as “a bribe, not broad-based black economic empowerment.” (Ibid.)Yes, in her autobiography Helen Zille described a BEE deal involving one of the major legacy mining behemoths in South Africa as “a bribe.”According to Zille, Gold Fields was engaged in the crime of bribery, but she did not open a criminal case against the parties involved.Later in her book Zille had this to say about BEE:“We need to redress both the legacy of apartheid, as well as crony-based BEE, which merely continues the legacy of apartheid, by excluding the majority of disadvantaged South Africans.” (Page 382)So for Zille BEE is legalised corruption under a fig leaf. It is a favour big business has paid to ANC elites to the tune of R500 billion in share-transfer deals in order to comply with the legal requirements of BEE in order to win government tenders and not out of conviction. It is the elite enrichment project. It is a bribe. It is a means big business used to buy favour from the ANC elite. And it is a continuation of the legacy of apartheid.You would think that these are very strong and principled views Helen Zille articulated and holds about BEE.However Helen Zille’s very strong and unambiguous views on BEE, which was designed by white big business and whose guidelines and an end product were pioneered by the BEE Commission of 1998 chaired by the self-same Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, inarguably one of the biggest and richest beneficiaries of this “elite enrichment project”, did not prevent her from co-signing with Ramaphosa the Statement of Intent to establish GNU.Perhaps like Ramaphosa, to paraphrase Michael Spicer, Otta Helen Zille too is not “a conviction politician” but just hungry for political power by any means.As Pieter du Toit’s book explicitly shows on its front cover, Ramaphosa is one of the public faces of this narrow-based form of BEE which produced “ANC billionaires” his colleague Bobby Godsell damned as “phoney” and Helen Zille calls a continuation of “the legacy of apartheid.”A case of a more blatant form of self-contradiction, of very loud but perfunctory, performative political morality and virtue signalling, as well as a near complete lack of political virtue ethics by a political leader as demonstrated by Helen Zille on BEE, Ramaphosa and GNU she co-anchors with Ramaphosa would be hard to conjure up, just as Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa once described South African flag-burning DA ad campaign as “treason” yet formed GNU with the same “treasonous” DA. (See Reuters’s article of 08 May 2024 by Tannur Anders under the tile “South Africa’s Ramaphosa calls opposition flag-burning ad ‘treasonous.’”) There once was a time when South Africa under Nelson Mandela hectored the entire world that South Africa was occupying the “moral high ground” on the planet. How things have since changed and fallen apart.GNU is the nearest thing we have since 1994 to an unprincipled, if not basest, political chicane. It is an expedient political contraption to gain power just for power’s sake. As the ANC of Ramaphosa puts it, through GNU it has defended its access to State Power and to the State tenders that go with such an access. Looks like the ANC of Ramaphosa fetishises State Power. Arguably there is no fiercer and more consistent critique of BEE than Moeletsi Mbeki, the younger brother of former president Thabo Mbeki and a sought-after political commentator in his own right. Moeletsi Mbeki launched a fiery takedown of BEE in his book Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing (Picador Africa, 2009), which is a no-hold-barred commentary on the ANC rule between 1994 and when the book was published in 2009, meaning the period when his elder brother Thabo was first deputy president to Nelson Mandela and subsequently was the president of South Africa, and which period the same Thabo Mbeki and the South African Institute for Race Relations (SAIRR) CEO John Enders have dubbed South Africa’s “Age One.. when everything worked and was going up and up.”[In his Anton Rupert: The Life of a Business Icon, the author Ebbe Dommisse wrote that “in July 2023 Dr John Enders, CEO of the Institute for Race Relations, stated in a briefing to the Cato Institute in Washington that private initiative was increasingly bypassing the incapable State. The country’s ‘greatest opportunity for future’ was to be found in its ‘innovation and resilient private sector and civil society’ that was successfully solving problems in many fields in the growing absence of the State. ‘In years to come, South Africa may well become a case study of how private sector succeeds where states fail,’ he remarked. Former president Thabo Mbeki said in response that ‘in political science’ this view of the private sector replacing government services ‘is characterised as a counter-revolutionary’”. (Tafelberg, 2024, page 401.)So former president Thabo Mbeki accused the same Dr John Enders he has repeatedly lauded for inventing the “Age One” concept to describe his and Nelson Mandela’s presidential leadership of post-apartheid South Africa of dabbling in counter-revolution, just as he has accused Jacob Zuma, his former Comrade-in-Arms, of doing the same? Incredible stuff indeed.] Wrote Moeletsi:“Most people in South Africa, in Africa, and the rest of the world naively believe that BEE was an invention of South Africa’s black nationalists, especially the African National Congress, which won the first democratic election in April 1994, leading to Nelson Mandela becoming the country’s first black president. This could not be further from the truth. BEE was, in fact, invented by South Africa’s economic oligarchs, that handful of white businessmen and their families who control the commanding heights of the country’s economy that is, mining and its associated chemical and engineering industries and finance.” (Page 66)What Moeletsi Mbeki was saying here with this statement was that what Helen Zille calls corruption under the fig leaf of BEE, what she calls an elite enrichment project, what she calls bribery and what she calls a continuation of apartheid was actually birthed by big white capital of South Africa, the biggest beneficiary out of slave ownership, colonialism, apartheid, white economic hegemony and legalised black destitution and whose interests she avers the DA she leads is defending, to capture ANC policy and ANC elites like Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, other “ANC billionaires” as well as other big-name BEE beneficiaries in the last three decades of our democracy.Of course we know the famous dictum that to every bribery there is the briber and the bribed. Moeletsi Mbeki and Helen Zille agree also on one other thing.In his book Moeletsi Mbeki said the following about this tiny and connected black business elite which benefited hugely from BEE designed by big white business and which includes Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa:“The object of BEE was to co-opt leaders of the black resistance movement by literally buying them off with what looked like a transfer to them of massive assets at no cost. To the oligarchs, of course, these assets were small change…This financial razzmatazz was designed to achieve a number of objectives. It was intended to:-Wean the ANC from radical economic ambitions, such as nationalising the major elements of the South Africa economy, by putting cash in the politicians’ private pockets, to look like atonement for the sins of apartheid, that is reparations to black people in general;- Provide oligarchs with prominent and influential seats at the high table of the ANC government’s economic policy formulation system]- Allow those oligarchs who wanted to shift their companies’ private listings and headquarters from Johannesburg to London to do so;- Give the oligarchs and their companies the first bite at government contracts to do so;-Protect the oligarchs from competition while opening up the rest of the economy, especially the consumer goods and manufacturing sector to the chill winds of international competition.” (Page 67 – 68.) Moeletsi Mbeki then calls all these measures he enumerated above as “machinations.”Merriam-Webster English dictionary describes the term machination as “a scheming or crafty action or artful design intended to accomplish some usually evil end.”I have no reason to suspect that Moeletsi Mbeki did not have in his mind this specific meaning of the term “machinations” when he chose to use it in the afore-mentioned context to describe measures and actions intended to flow out of implementation of the rotten-to-the –core and narrow-based BEE which hugely benefited a select few “ANC billionaires” and a handful of other connected ANC high profile personalities. In 2013 Sunday Times (SA) reported that Mathews Phosa alone, together with David Cleasby, sat on over 80 boards of companies. (Sunday Times article “Not enough talents for SA’s boards” by Loni Prinsloo and Adele Shevel, 03 March 2013).On Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, the same Sunday Times article stated:“Cyril Ramaphosa, a former businessman and now ANC deputy president, still holds about 50 active board membership.”Completely unheard of till then that an ANC Deputy President would sit on boards of “about” 50 private sector companies.Another IOL article of 21 years back under the title “Mathews Phosa sits on so many chairs that he has hardened to controversy” stated the following about Phosa, former ANC Treasurer General and Mpumalanga Premier:“He admits that his business involvement seems to be with medium players rather than large ones, like those of Ramaphosa and Sexwale.”It seems Ramaphosa, if his biographer Anton Butler is to be believed and this IOL article, quoting Mathews Phosa, is to be trusted, has been tied to the hip to big white business for quite a while.By the way, it would also be very apposite to describe GNU as another instance of a political “razzmatazz”, to borrow a term of Moeletsi Mbeki. In PART TWO of this article I described GNU as a raucous caravan on the move to entertain crowds across our country and to defocus them from demanding that Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa be held accountable for leading the ANC into its most shattering loss of power following the 29 May 2024 election, a second time he did so.And machination as a term to describe BEE rhymes well with what Pieter du Toit, Bobby Godsell, Helen Zille and William Mervin Gumede have written about BEE to condemn it in very stark terms. Lastly, what Moeletsi Mbeki wrote to describe BEE cognates well with what Michael McDonald wrote in his book Why Race Matters in South Africa. (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006).Michael McDonald wrote, three years before Moeletsi Mbeki published his Architects of Poverty book, that:“Capitalist societies vest power in financial markets, corporate boardrooms, and economic discourse. In South Africa, all these theaters remain under the control of whites. Of course, that does not mean the whites who control them necessarily act as whites, that they are concerned with furthering racial objectives. But it does mean that whites have power at their disposal, that their powers are not necessarily limited to economic affairs, and that the government is competing for their confidence; it means that whites, whatever their electoral prospects, have political influence, that they have economic power that can be deployed in defense of their “cultural” identities, and that they can check and balance the majority’s power.” (Page 132.)In short, a white minority in South Africa descended from western European colonisers wield an economic veto over the black majority’s electoral and political power and choices in post-apartheid democratic South Africa. I too chipped in with my two pence wisdom in my online Politicsweb article I titled “The NDP and its Cheerleaders” of 25 March 2013 where I wrote the following about BEE, whilst commenting on the National Development Plan (NDP):“Or is the NDP merely a policy cover to legitimise the incubus- and succubus-like feeding frenzy of the emergent and rapacious BEE oligarchs and State bureaucratic as well as parasitic black hyenas who are in an unholy alliance with white big capital and who indicate left but turn right?”This I wrote twelve years ago.I was accusing the BEE oligarchs and their fellow travellers of engaging in an unseemly feeding frenzy akin to demonic spirits prowling the big white corporate bedrooms and the corridors of State power at night in a feeding frenzy and “an unholy alliance with white big capital.” As the French would say, j’ ai accuse! I accused!As a matter of fact evidently this “Unholy Alliance” has unfortunately proven to be more durable, more powerful and more consequential than the dying and fading ANC-led Tripartite Alliance, which was not consulted regarding the formation of GNU, if the SACP General Secretary Solly Mapaila is to be believed. (See IOL article “SACP leader’s comments that ANC sold out to the DA for GNU are an insult – Mbalula” by Simon Majadibodu, 02 September 2024.)Kark Marx and Frederick Engels put it thus in The Communist Manifesto:“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”So with GNU.In addition in my article “Z. Pallo Jordan: A great anti-Stalinist embracing a Stalinist purge” of 02 February 2022, I wrote the following about this “unholy alliance”:“Post-apartheid democratic South Africa has not experienced any fundamental change of ruling bourgeois class from the pre-1994 status quo ante founded on European colonisation of South Africa since 1652 and the Afrikaner apartheid regimes between 1948 to 1994.If anything a small, rapacious and self-aggrandising minority of ANC leaders have joined the pre-1994 ruling white bourgeois class and by so doing overnight turned themselves into black multi-millionaires and billionaires, solely on account of their monopolised and exclusive proximity to the pre-1994 white European bourgeois establishment in South Africa founded on the blood and sweat of our poor black people.” As Helen Zille put it, the DA was instructed by big business to defend Ramaphosa in the context of the formation of GNU which excluded the EFF and as I indicated in PART TWO of this article, Gayton McKenzie of the unpatriotic Patriotic Front revealed the huge pressure big white business exerted on the ANC and the DA to force them to collaborate and to engage in an arranged marriage and to form GNU.There is a fascinating and quite popular (in radical political circles) YouTube video of Moeletsi Mbeki lambasting businessman Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa’s nonchalant, insouciant, if not rudely offhand attitude to his role as the non-executive chairman of Bidvest, a highly diversified big white capital conglomerate founded in 1988 and for many years led by its founder businessman Brian Joffe, as if Moeletsi Mbeki sought to amplify William Mervin Gumede’s charge that “…many BEE companies are little more than facades” and that “examples abound of black businessmen who rent their faces to white bosses so that the latter can satisfy the requirements of government tenders.” Moeletsi Mbeki in that video further revealed that when he confronted Brian Joffe about this unacceptable situation of a non-executive Bidvest chairman Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa missing many board meetings, Brian Joffe, dubbed The Magician of Melrose Arch by the online BizNews outlet, told him not to worry as he (Brian Joffe, a Jewish white South African business titan) was running the show at Bidvest, implying that Ramaphosa was just a titutlar chairman of the board, a nice to have board addition solely to meet BEE requirements, apparently. Ronald Suresh Roberts, in his book Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki (STE Publishers, 2007) states that “in 1984, Harry Oppenheimer told Le Monde that it would be a good idea to pick out capable young blacks while they were still at university and systematically groom them for greater things – deliberately turn them into an elite.” (Page 247.) This sounds like what former Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng would define as “capture in advance” or “pre-paid capture.” A recent BusinessTech article of 08 May 2025 under the title “The famous school that Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Walter Sisuslu’s children attended” called The Waterford Kamhlaba United World College of Southern Africa (Waterford) in Eswati (formerly Swaziland), had Harry Oppenheimers as one of its biggest donors and benefactors. As the article by BusinessTech Staff Writer put it:“Harry Oppenheimer, chairman of Anglo American, funded the science laboratories, which are still used today”.The article cooed:“Waterford was the first school in southern Africa open to children of all colours, and many of South Africa’s leaders’ children attended the school…The school educated the children of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Desmond Tutu, and Nobel prize winning novelist Nadine Gordimer. It was also attended by the children of the first President of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama, and the revolutionary leaders of Mozambique Samora Macherl and Eduardo Mondlane. The school continues to nurture Africa’s future political, business and civic leaders.”Catch them young, Harry Oppenheimer might have said.Ronald Suresh Roberts also reveals in his book that Jonathan Oppenheimer, the scion of Nick Oppenheimer (the scion of Harry Oppenheimer) of Anglo American and De Beer dynastic fame, (or infamy, depending on your raw sense of smell, or lack thereof), stated that he saw no problem whatsoever in gaining policy capture. Roberts quotes Jonathan as posing a rhetorical question “what’s wrong with policy capture if it’s good policy (sic).” (Page 82, ibid.)Who defines what is a good policy? To what ends of society? Does it even matter to white oligarchs like Jonathan Oppenheimer whether a good policy flows from a democratic exercise or from the whims of a dictator or an authoritarian figure like USA president Donald Trump or Meloni, the Italian prime minister? Or is it determined by big white business’ think tanks like the Oppenheimers’ Brenhurst Foundation?Elsewhere in his book Ronald Suresh Roberts quotes Sir Theodore Gregory, the official biographer of Ernest Oppenheimer, the paterfamilia of the Anglo American behemoth, portraying Harry Oppenheimer’s father through a Rand Daily Mail cartoon “as a developmental god” instead of being “a historical rival of the native and a conquerer” in the “imperialist tradition.” (Page 129, ibid.)The narrow-based BEE became the confluence point for what Harry and Jonathan Oppenheimer envisaged respectively, and what “a developmental god”…in “imperialist tradition” Ernest Oppenheimer had in mind in that Rand Daily Mail cartoon, as quoted by Ronald Suresh Roberts, and as lucidly expounded upon by Moeletsi Mbeki in the first two bullet points above on BEE and its big business designers in his Architects of Poverty book.In short, BEE became the most important lubricant for the success and triumph of neoliberalism in post-apartheid democratic South Africa. Without BEE, it would have been impossible for neoliberalism to enjoy the sway it does today and in the last three decades. And thus neoliberalism cannot be defeated in South Africa without first dealing a body blow to narrow-based BEE which has enriched only a handful of connected black individuals like Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa. BEE is what has made ANC leaders to fervently protect a neoliberal economy in South Africa which benefits manly a few in the last three decades.For his part Adebajo Adekeye in his book Thabo Mbeki described the 1996 neoliberal GEAR policy framework of former presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki’s administrations as “pure alchemy, a futile attempt to turn lead into gold through mysterious incantations from neo-liberal prophets.” (Ohio University Press, 2016, page 97.) I argue that post-2024 GNU can also be viewed as “pure alchemy, a futile attempt to turn lead into gold through mysterious incantations from neo-liberal prophets.” Adekeye further damned BEE as “crony capitalism.” (Page 100, ibid.) Or as Bobby Godsell put it, “a narrow band of connected individuals were enriched.” Unwittingly Bobby Godesell was offering is a textbook, classic definition of what crony capitalism is.Politically unconnected black poor masses in their tens of millions remain impoverished.On the other hand Ebbe Dommisse had this to say about Cyril Ramaphosa’s time as the president of South Africa:“The decay continued under Ramaphosa after he had promised a New Dawn.” (Tafelberg, 2024, ibid, page 399.)What Ebbe Dommisse was saying is that instead of breaking with what he bizarrely termed “nine wasted years” under president Jacob Zuma and launching a promised “New Dawn”, Ramaphosa’s administrations represent nothing but the extension and continuation of the nine wasted years and what we got was decay instead of a new dawn and national or ANC renewal.In a remarkable turn of events, Jacob Zuma’s chief accuser (Ramaphosa) has become the accused.The hunter has become the hunted. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.This is undoubtedly a searing a critique of the Ramaphosa’s presidential leadership by a prominent white South African author. Perhaps the deepest cut from white big business against Ramaphosa was delivered by none other than Andre du Ruyter, the former CEO and executive Director of NAMPAK, the former General Manager of SASOL and the man the government led by Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa appointed and defended stoically as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the beleaguered giant electricity utility ESKOM at the height of South Africa’s load shedding or national electricity outage crisis and under whom the country experienced the worst and longest bouts of load shedding ever.There is no other white person in South Africa who was ever so stoically defended by Ramaphosa and his then deputy David Mabuza (whom other ANC cadres continue to vilify and slander as “the Judas Iscariot of the 2017 Nasrec ANC national conference”) with such gusto from attacks after his appointment to lead the Eskom parastatal than this clumsily tall Andre de Ruyter fella. (See TimesLive article titled “Ramaphosa defends appointment of white Eskom CEO” of 23 November 2019.)Yet the self-same Andre de Ruyter returned Ramaphosa’s kind favour and stabbed the latter in the back by stating, in words which uncannily echoed the searing words of Michael Spicer above about Ramaphosa not being “a conviction politician”, preferring “to lead from behind,” and not being “a get-out-ahead, decisive sort of guy.”Said Andre de Ruyter about Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa:“But I could not escape the conclusion that in running the country, he was more of a genial country-club manager than a decisive leader…You can play darts , I can play golf, someone else can play tennis – and as long as everyone is happy and wearing the same green, black and yellow T-shirt, the president is happy.” (BusinessTech article “Ramaphosa more of a country-club manager than president, says De Ruyter,” 15 March 2023.)And this is how Daily Investor of 28 May 2023 reported on Andre de Ruyter’s views and opinions on Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa:“Former Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter said that he ‘found the President impressive’ and very charming. However he lacked decisive leadership and resembled a ‘genial country club manager’…Ramaphosa’s personal residence reminded De Ruyter of nouveau riche Afrikaners’ houses – ‘It was built to impress rather than to be liveable’…The President took the ‘Dow Steyn approach.’”Ouch. That must have hurt.But De Ruyter left the worst for last in his embittered, unrestraint takedown of Ramaphosa, his former black boss and stalwart defender in the South African State:De Ruyter continued his astonishing anti-Ramaphosa diatribe thus, as quoted by Daily Investor:“’In person, very charming – someone you could have a beer and a lekker kuier’ with. However, Ramaphosa is not a great orator and does not have much charisma…Ramaphosa allows each minister to ‘cook their own broth as far as policymaking is concerned’…The President is handicapped by infighting amongst the African National Congress (ANC), and his solution was to be ‘a leader who wants to be all things to all men’ rather than be decisive.’’And this killer, haymaker punch from Andre de Ruyter, as reported by Daily Investor, must have floored Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa cold:“When it came to Ramaphosa’s business acumen, De Ruyter is far more ruthless. While Ramaphosa is regarded as a successful businessman, he is ‘not someone who has hands-on experience of building an enterprise from bottom up. Shrewd corporate dealmaking, lubricated by favourable black economic empowerment legislation, built his fortune,’ according to De Ruyter.This can be confidently said pretty much about the entire class of BEE oligarchs in South Africa who have benefited handsomely from the narrow-based, money-for-jam BEE. They are businessmen (and some businesswomen) only in the strictly narrow political sense of the word businessmen and businesswomen. And they are not self-made at all, but the product of big business’s gambit, to paraphrase Pieter du Toit’s book tittle.It was as if Andre de Ruyter was unwittingly echoing the searing words of Michael Spicer, Bobby Godsell, William Mervin Gumede, Helen Zille, Moeletsi Mbeki, Adebajo Adekeye, Isaac Mpho Mogotsi and others on the ruinous and deleterious nature of rotten-to-the-core, money for a rope and narrow-based BEE and its connected few individual beneficiaries like Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, our State President and leader of the fast-fading, visionless, fumbling and clueless ANC.Susan Booysen, the author of the book Precarious Power: Compliance and Discontent under Ramaphosa’s ANC (Wits University Press, 2021) “reveals a weak president wavering on a tightrope between serving the needs of the organisation and those of the nation”, as declared by Wits University Press upon the release of the book. Booysen also viewed Ramaphosa’s wealth and his close link to big business as constituting his weaknesses. If these titans of big white business in our country have such a negative and unflattering views and opinions about Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership qualities, why did big business “instruct” Helen Zille’s DA to “defend” him with regard to the formation of GNU following the historic, watershed and unprecedented 29 May 2024 election outcome, our collective moment of decisive national political rapture?And why did the same big business pour hundreds of millions of Rands into Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa’s #CR2017campaign, whose paper trail is still embargoed from public view by our courts, to enable him to triumph, albeit by a waifer thin margin, over his ANC leadership rival Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma at the December 2017 Nasrec ANC national conference?CONCLUDING REMARKS.In a surprise turn of events, president Ramaphosa in 2022 blamed everything imaginable for unemployment and slow economic growth in our country but the failures of the government he led to fulfil its promises to the electorate. (See Sowetan article by Mawande AmaShabalala titled “Ramaphosa blames July 2021unrest, Covid and floods for unemployment and slow economic growth” of 05 Septemeber 2022. Yet when it came to what he termed “nine wasted years” during the presidency of Jacob Zuma in 2009 to 20018, Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa squarely blamed Jacob Zuma for the economy tanking, for unemployment, for so-called State Capture corruption and for any conceivable societal ills at the time, although he deputised Zuma for the last four of those so-called nine wasted years he bemoans.It is thus not unthinkable that Ramaphosa will one day blame the visible dysfunction and chaos of the GNU he formed with Helen Zille and which he steers, evidently “brilliantly”, according to our national xenophobe champion, former criminal and former jailbird and hectic Sport, Arts and Culture Minister and self-proclaimed “honourable bandit” Gayton McKenzie, for rising unemployment and slow economic growth in the years following the 2024 elections.GNU is emerging as the most blatantly shambolic, divided as well as divisive and quarrelsome government arrangement since the end of apartheid in 1994. Since its formation the public is treated every day by GNU constituent components to all sorts of policy disagreements and shenanigans besetting and hobbling it, with Helen Zille ever ready and happy to lop in her idiosyncratic policy Molotov cocktails into the work of GNU to successfully disrupt its shakier and shakier harmony.2024 GNU is a terrible publicity for future coalition governments in South Africa and a handy vindication for Saki Macozoma when he cautioned against forming a weak coalition government like those in Italy.It thus came as a great surprise that when addressing the Business Council for International Understanding (BCIU) in New York in September 2024 Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa referred to GNU as “a second miracle,” echoing, believe or not, off-the-rocker term of South Africa’s premier national xenophobe, former criminal and jailbird Gayton McKenzie, now part of GNU national executive.If GNU is “a second miracle” then pigs can fly over the moon and I can be richer than Elon Musk and ancient Malian ruler Mansa Musa.Calling GNU “a second miracle” is not only deliberately deceptive and misleading, it also goes to illustrate how desperate those who formed or later joined it are. [In passing, it is worth noting that outside the ANC and DA, the two main GNU co-anchors, the other nine smallanyana political parties who later joined it have a combined vote share from the 2024 election which is less than the vote cast for Julius Malema’s EFF alone. This alone shows that to call the political contraption named GNU as representing “national unity” is patently false and self-deluding.]Helen Zille and the DA do not hide their disdain for the ANC, saying that they will be part of GNU only as long as it is led only by Ramaphosa and for that long only, and by no other ANC leader. What Helen Zille and the DA are communicating by this peculiar posture is that they formed GNU with the political personality of Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa and not with the ANC as such, for which they feel and express open disgust almost daily. They also seek to thus use GNU to impose Ramaphosa as the ANC leader for the five year duration of GNU until the next national election in 2029. For them even ANC deputy president Paul Mashatile, democratically elected by ANC branched at the last December 2022 Nasrec ANC national conference, is completely unacceptable to co-lead GNU with Helen Zille. For Helen Zille and the DA, it is either Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa leads GNU or there will be no GNU and presumably the country can go to hell.How does one make sense of such a bizarre and contortionist political posture by a rival political party (the DA) towards the leader of another rival political party (the ANC of Ramaphosa), as if the DA regards Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa as the secret agent of Helen Zille and the DA within the fast-collapsing ANC?This is unheard of.Addressing the South African Chamber of Commerce UK last year, Zille made it abundantly clear that big business “sent” her and the DA to protect Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa from Jacob Zuma’s MK party and from Julius Malema’s EFF following the 2024 election outcome and following the monumental election disaster Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa led the ANC into, as The Star (SA) reported at the time. Otta Helen Zille did not say that big business sent her and the DA to protect the ANC from MKP and EFF. Protecting the ANC is not the DA, big business and Zille’s mission, whilst protecting Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, the leader of the same humiliated ANC of Ramaphosa, is, according to Otta Helen Zille.Bizarre does not even begin to describe this highly unorthodox political posture.Nelson Mandela, faced with a similar intolerable situation where the media, the white community and the western leaders like former American president Bill Clinton were praising him to high heavens in order to damn other ANC leaders like his former deputy president Thabo Mbeki, wrote a powerful letter to The Sunday Times (SA) on 25 February 1996 strongly protesting against the destructing practice which was fashionable then to praise him as a way of divorcing and isolating him from the rest of ANC leaders.Wrote Nelson Mandela:“A ridiculous notion is sometimes advanced that Mandela has been exclusively responsible for these real achievements of the South African people, particularly our smooth transition.”In singling out only Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa as the ANC leader they can do GNU business with, the DA and its leader Helen Zille wilfully ignore the note of caution Nelson Mandela sounded thirty years ago.The DA and Helen Zille never miss an opportunity, since the outcome of the 2024 election, to show to South Africans and the rest of the world just how much they are seemingly invested in the political personality of Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa. They have publicly declared that they are no more interested in further pursuing the Phala Phala scandal because Phala Phala is allegedly not worse that the scandals of former president Jacob Zuma. They have also made it clear that they would not support a parliamentary no confidence motion against Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa brought by the EFF.Of course this is a trick Helen Zille and the DA have used beforeIn my online Politicsweb article titled “The Sorry State of South Africa’s Opposition Parties, Part Two, of 04 March 2014, I wrote:“This is a failure of the opposition imagination amplified by the latest trick of DA’s Helen Zille to profusely praise former ANC and SA president Thabo Mbeki as a step-ladder to issuing more cauterising moral and ethical condemnation of president Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki’s successor in the SA presidency.” More than a decade later and in the context of GNU, Helen Zille and the DA are at it again, exclusively praising Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa to high heavens, whilst damning in severest terms his deputy Paul Mashatile, with whom they seemingly are not prepared to continue GNU post-Ramaphosa.This is nothing short of colonialist white European political entitlement and arrogance in Africa. The DA and Helen Zille have arrogated to themselves the right to determine who in their lights is the best ANC leader to serve their and big white business interests regarding GNU, and not necessarily the best ANC leader to advance the basic interests of all South Africans. Neither have Helen Zille and the DA ever claimed that Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa is the best leader the ANC has to implement the resolutions of the two ANC national conferences which elected him the leader, nor that Ramaphosa is the best ANC leader to advance the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution (NDR), a core ANC ideological gene brilliantly articulated by Nelson Mandela in the economic realm already in 1958, which both Helen Zille and the DA hate passionately.In another context, Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher very early on in his political rise to power identified Mikhael Gorbachev as a man she and the West could do business with. What Thatcher presciently saw in Gorbachev even earlier than then American president Ronald Reagan did was that Gorbachev, through his Glasnosti and Perestroika reform initiatives, would be the destroyer of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party as well as the Eastern European Communist bloc.Is Helen Zille trying to do a Margaret Thatcher on the ANC through Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa’s “nine wasted years” claim, his New Dawn and his ANC Renewal reform package?Helen Zille and the DA must be convinced that their divide and rule tactic to isolate an individual ANC leader and heap saccharine praises on him whilst damning other ANC leaders like ANC deputy president Paul Mashatile is an effective colonial trick.How come Ebb Dommisse, Anton Rupert biographer, sees only decay since Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa ascended to lead the ANC and the country whilst Helen Zille and the DA are insisting to bet everything on Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa continuing to lead South Africa, the ANC and the highly grotesque and shambolic 2024 GNU until the 2029 election? Something smells rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark, to quote William Shakespear. The posture by president Ramaphosa and former president Thabo Mbeki to prefer to convene the so-called National Dialogue ahead of the convening of a national gathering of ANC branches either as a National General Council (NGC) or as a National Policy Conference (NPC) to discuss and review the disastrous ANC performance in the 2024 election plays into this dastardly political divide-and-rule trick of the DA and Helen Zille to portray Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa as the only worthy, holy, acceptable to the DA, indispensable and irreplaceable for the future of national coalition politics in South Africa, and in particular for the future of GNU.This is a personality cult on steroids which Otta Helen Zille and the DA she leads seek to create and build around Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa.It also runs counter to what in my three-part online Politicsweb article on The Sorry State of South African Opposition Parties more than a decade ago I argued was perhaps the greatest ANC democratic legacy to future generations, that is its laudable ability and readiness, whenever the circumstances so demanded of it historically, to recall any of its failing leaders, from its founding president John Dube, through its subsequent presidents like Sefako Makgatho, Josiah Thangana Gumede, Rev Zacharia Mahabane, Pixley Isaka ka Seme, again Rev Mahabane, Dr Alfred Bitini Xuma, Dr James Moroka, Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki and down to Jacob Zuma, all who the ANC either recalled or voted out of power for this or that reason.In Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, Helen Zille and the DA seek to create a special ANC category and dispensation for a serving but failing ANC leader who twice led the ANC into catastrophic election defeats (the 2021 local government election and the 2024 national election) and is most likely to do so for a third time in the 2026 local election but who Helen Zille and the DA want to immunise from the laudable ANC principle of the recall of elected officials and to put him beyond the demands by ANC branches for political accountability for his astonishing and unprecedented electoral failures.This are the same Helen Zille and the DA who booted out Mmusi Maimane, their first DA black leader, for leading the DA only once into a dismal but not catastrophic 2019 election outcome. Maimane was not extended the dubious political favours Helen Zille and the DA now want to extend to Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, the leader of the rival ANC.He was humiliated like a used condom!If the terms political politrics and chicanery do not describe the political posture by Helen Zille and the DA regarding Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC he leads, then I truly do not know what does..*Isaac Mpho Mogotsi, Award winning author of the novel The Alexandra Tales (Ravan Press, 1994)Founder & Executive ChairmanCentre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)https://centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.comisaacmogotsi@centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.cominfo@centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com

Isaac Mogotsi pt. 4: Inside the GNU built to save Ramaphosa, not South Africa

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