The latest people to be betrayed by Cyril Ramaphosa are the people of Zimbabwe.
After yet another blatantly crooked election there, so crooked in fact that even the usually supine SADC declared it not to be fair and free, President Ramaphosa in his charming way extended his warmest congratulations to President Mnangagwa for ‘holding the harmonised elections’ and winning them.
Then, to add lying to treachery, he said: ‘South Africa is conscious that these elections took place in a difficult economic environment due to the burdening sanctions that the people of Zimbabwe continue to unjustly endure.’
The fact of the matter is that Zimbabwe, a once prosperous and well-fed country, has been ruined by the massive corruption, incompetence, bloodshed and tyranny of ZANU-PF, first under Robert Mugabe and now under Emmerson Mnangagwa.
Mnangagwa is best known for leading the Gukurahundi racial slaughter in Matabeleland from 1983 to 1987, where the Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwean army murdered over 20,000 Ndebele men, women, children and unborn babies.
Had Ramaphosa been in power in South Africa then, no doubt he would have sent Mnangagwa his warmest congratulations for this slaughter, and blamed all Zimbabwe’s problems on something the West had done. ZANU-PF has lost every election since 2000 but always kept power by fraud, violence and fear, helped tremendously by the ANC, especially in 2008.
The USA and other Western countries applied selected sanctions, such as travel bans, against certain individuals in the Zimbabwean Government who were guilty of gross violations of human rights. There were no sanctions against the country or people of Zimbabwe.
In practice what it meant was that Mugabe’s wife was no longer free to buy millions of dollars’ worth of luxury goods at Harrods in London. The ANC has betrayed the people of Zimbabwe. The poor people of Zimbabwe have been tortured, murdered, starved, terrorised, impoverished and humiliated by Mugabe and Mnangagwa, but Cyril Ramaphosa doesn’t care a damn about them. In fact he doesn’t give a damn about any poor, suffering people, including the people of South Africa.
Cares nothing
He also cares nothing for the thousands of men, women and children murdered on our farms since 1990. On 26 September 2018, in a carefully prepared statement to Bloomberg, the US news agency, Ramaphosa said, ‘There are no killings of farmers or white farmers in South Africa.’ (By that time, the South African Police had recorded over 1 700 farm murders.) When Julius Malema recently made headlines around the world by chanting, ‘Shoot to kill! Kill the Boer, the farmer! Kill the Boer, the farmer!’ in front of an enraptured crowd of 100 000, Elon Musk tweeted, ‘Cyril Ramaphosa, Why do you say nothing?’
What did Ramaphosa, the President of South Africa, say to that? Nothing. He had obviously noticed the loud cheering for Malema’s call for bloodshed, and is obviously very respectful of Malema’s forcefulness and support, and obviously has no sympathy at all for the families tortured and murdered on the farms, so he did his usual treacherous, cowardly thing and refused to criticise the bully, and will probably soon offer Malema some charming invitation.
Since Ramaphosa’s presidency has been disastrous for South Africa, why is most of the ANC so keen to keep him as its leader? Because he wins votes. No other leader could win as many votes for the ANC in 2024 as Ramaphosa (although that might not be enough for an outright majority). He wins votes because he is popular. There was euphoria when he became President in 2018. Why is he so popular? Because he is very charming. He smiles a lot and speaks very reasonably with a soft, assuring voice.
Ramaphosa’s charm has caused harm to South Africa since 1994 but previously it did some good. He played a key role in ending apartheid in a negotiated settlement. But here is a point to be noticed. Apart from early confrontations with apartheid and an arrest, Ramaphosa never confronted any strong man. In negotiations, he did what the strong men of the ANC behind him wanted him to do, and he charmed the opposing strong men of the National Party and business who were desperate for a deal.
The 1976 Soweto uprising spelt the doom of apartheid. After that the masters of apartheid stopped fooling themselves that it would ever work and began a desperate, blundering attempt to reform it. Some of the reforms were real, notably the recognition of the black trade unions in 1979 and the ending of the Pass Laws in 1986.
Rose to eminence
It was in this era that Ramaphosa rose to eminence. He became a highly successful trade union leader and, since the ANC was then banned and the unions were the only legal representatives of its black supporters, he become a powerful negotiator between them and the NP and big business. Both the government and business were eager to deal with him, and his charm increased their eagerness.
Big business had two reasons for disliking apartheid: it was shameful, and it was bad for profits. So Ramaphosa didn’t have to confront anyone during these negotiations; they were all on his side.
President P W Botha’s desperate, irascible, insufficient reforms were heading nowhere, and in 1989 he was succeeded by F W de Klerk, who soon ended the cruel nonsense of apartheid by unbanning the ANC and the SACP, scrapping the worst apartheid laws and calling all parties to a negotiated settlement. De Klerk had to confront and overcome the greatest danger to democracy, the powerful, hardline white men who wanted apartheid to continue. He did so with skill and courage, typified by his daring and brilliant referendum in 1992.
In the negotiations for a democratic settlement, Ramaphosa was dominant, using skill and charm (no courage was required), running rings around the fallen masters of apartheid. He played a big part in the successful transition to democracy in April 1994. He did very well for South Africa up to then, but after that he did no good at all.
In Rhodesia in the 1970s, there were two main black parties fighting to overthrow the white minority rule of Ian Smith. ZANU had the support of the Shona, about 80% of the population; its armed wing was ZANLA and its leader was Robert Mugabe. ZAPU had the support of the Ndebele, about 20% of the population; its armed wing was ZIPRA and its leader was Joshua Nkomo. The ANC, then in exile, supported ZAPU and Nkomo. So did Russia. China supported ZANU and Mugabe. Voting in the 1980 election was purely tribal, as everyone had expected, and so Mugabe became Prime Minister.
Acts of terrorism
There were skirmishes between ZAPU and ZANU, who hated each other. There were acts of terrorism, including against British tourists. Arms caches belonging to ZANLA, ZIPRA and the ANC were found all over the place. In 1981 there was an attempted mutiny in Bulawayo by elements of ZIPRA. It was put down, significantly enough not by ZANU but by white soldiers, the remnants of Rhodesia’s army.
Mugabe then brought in the North Korean army to form and train his Fifth Brigade to slaughter Ndebele people, which it proceeded to do in 1983 in Operation Gukurahundi. Mnangagwa, as Minister of State Security, directed the bloodshed. The ANC, seeing that Mugabe was more powerful and dangerous than Nkomo, switched sides, as is its nature, and supported Mugabe. It didn’t speak a word of criticism against Mugabe’s slaughter of Ndebele people. I assume that its silence implied it supported the racial slaughter. And so I assume did Cyril Ramaphosa, then an important figure in the ANC.
In 2000 Mugabe, having lost a proper referendum, began his seizure of the white farms. Just under 20 white farmers were murdered, about 750,000 black farm workers and their families were evicted and thrown into destitution and hunger, and Zimbabwean agriculture collapsed, taking the once promising economy with it.
How the ANC clapped and cheered! They thought it was wonderful. Mugabe always got standing ovations from the ANC when he visited South Africa. I’m sure Ramaphosa took careful note of this, and made quite sure he never lost an opportunity to fawn and grovel before any ZANU tyrant ruling Zimbabwe. In fact any African tyrant who commits atrocities against black people can always be assured the full diplomatic support of the ANC government.
There was huge relief in South Africa (including from me) when Ramaphosa took over from President Jacob Zuma after his ‘nine wasted years’. When Ramaphosa campaigned for and won the 2017 contest for the Presidency of the ANC, many observers thought he had won a brave fight against the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction of the ANC, then represented by one of Jacob Zuma’s ex-wives, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. RET seems to stand for Leninist-Marxist state control and black nationalism, in fact pretty much the same as the ANC’s founding policy, the National Democratic Revolution.
Very weak
But it now seems that the RET faction chose Ramaphosa over Dlamini-Zuma because he could win votes for them and was also very weak, and would therefore surely do anything they told him to do. He’s certainly done so. He has passed the bill for Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC), which is probably just a prelude to the seizure of private farms in the style of his adored Robert Mugabe. Already the ANC is passing laws to restrict the water rights of white farmers, thereby making their farms worthless.
He has strengthened the disastrous Employment Equity Act, further damaging the economy, especially for poor black people. And he is promoting National Health Insurance (NHI) which will reduce all hospitals in South Africa to the ruinous state of government hospitals in the Eastern Cape. He has stated very clearly how much he supports BEE and cadre deployment, which have helped to destroy most of our infrastructure and municipalities. How much of this destructive rubbish Ramaphosa really believes in doesn’t matter much, since he can be guaranteed to implement it, because strong men have told him to implement it.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, President Ramaphosa acted with decisive cowardice. He followed the worst of the mad lockdowns around the world, so causing far more harm than the virus ever could have done, crippling the economy, increasing unemployment and killing a lot of people, especially poor black children. He did whatever his stupid ministers told him to do, with bans on open shoes, bans on cigarettes and alcohol, and bans on going out into the wide, open spaces of heat and sunlight in the middle of the day.
When once he tried to lift the ban on cigarettes, he was kicked aside by Dlamini-Zuma, who renewed the ban. (Cigarette smokers actually had some protection against Covid since Covid causes inflammation of the blood vessels in the deep lung and nicotine is anti-inflammatory.)
Recently Ramaphosa has been oozing with charm in the recent BRICS conference in Johannesburg, celebrating the delightful company of Xi Jinping of China and Sergey Lavrov of Russia (standing in for Vladimir Putin, who for embarrassing reasons could not be present.) We hear that BRICS will soon be enlarged to include such bastions of peace and democracy as Ethiopia and Iran. Why not bring in Nigeria, Gabon, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela? Perhaps they will follow. I’m sure Ramaphosa would just love them to do so.
Prepared to pay a lot
Ramaphosa has certainly been supremely successful in enriching himself. In the last days of apartheid, business tycoons were anxiously vying for his favours and prepared to pay a lot of money for them. Through BEE deals and appointments on boards of directors Ramaphosa made a fortune – or was given a fortune – and is now said to be worth over R6 billion, almost as much as President Mnangagwa is said to be worth. I really don’t know much about the Phala Phala affair, when R10 million in USA dollars were found in a sofa at Ramaphosa’s 4,500-hectare game farm. What interests me more are the enormous sums of money he has to splash about on his hobbies and recreations. This is in a country where mass poverty is growing and millions are living on the edge of starvation.
We are being led by a rich, charming, treacherous coward, and he is leading us further and deeper into disaster.
[Image: From 2019 https://www.flickr.com/photos/governmentza/33184810298]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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