Patrice Motsepe — mining magnate, philanthropist and football club owner — is going to be the next leader of the ANC. There’s no question. He’s ethically clean, dynamic, charming, rich as Croesus and smart.
With the two “formal” candidates vying to replace Cyril Ramaphosa at the end of next year — deputy president Paul Mashatile and ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula — both buckling under allegations of corruption and incompetence, desperate ANC supporters would die for Motsepe.
He is the only rescue on the horizon. Normally reliable polling from the Social Research Foundation has the ANC — on a 56% turnout — at 39%, with the DA on 28%. The DA is unlikely to do much better before the local elections later this year; for the ANC, falling below 40% would be borderline fatal.
Some parties never recover from that kind of collapse. In South Africa, the African nationalist vote would also have to include Jacob Zuma’s MK Party and Julius Malema’s EFF — but even they are performing poorly in the polls. If there were to appear a conservative or even right-of-centre ANC leader, I doubt they would find it hard to move the ANC to where they are if it meant political survival. Nationalists are nothing if not pliable.
I have no idea what Motsepe’s politics are. While he makes generous donations to a number of the bigger parties, he has been pitching up at ANC conferences for ages — once cheekily swiping Madiba’s parking place. It’s okay; he’s a kind and thoroughly decent man, though I don’t know whether he is tough enough for our politics.
But like Ramaphosa — his brother-in-law — before him, he has little choice. He’ll become ANC leader and its presidential candidate. There is, simply, no-one else. A campaign machine, PM27, is already up and running, insisting — just as Ramaphosa’s CR17 did post facto — that the candidate himself is not involved. A likely story.
Our problems are rooted in poor policy and compounded by the extent to which it is ‘delivered’
Motsepe arguably has a more formidable CV than Ramaphosa ever did. At the ANC’s Mangaung conference in 2012, when Jacob Zuma was president, then deputy ANC and state president Kgalema Motlanthe declined to stand, and Zuma’s people pulled Ramaphosa on board. But he was treated with great disdain by them. Motsepe would have no such problems. For a start, the ANC is on its electoral knees and his business experience runs deeper.
But two things worry me. First, the physical toll: the media bombardment, the travel, the people, the issues and the crises. It will never stop. Second, is he in any way prepared for the scale of state failure? Ramaphosa insists our problems are just a question of poor delivery, but he long ago departed for Arcadia. Our problems are, actually, deeply rooted in extremely poor policy and compounded by the extent to which it is “delivered”.
An example: a few days ago, the biggest building in my old home town Mthatha — 11 storeys high, packed with records of title deeds, land claims and welfare awards — burned down. Everything is gone. The department of labour declared the building unsafe three years ago; Mthatha did not have a fire engine capable of reaching even the third floor. It is a catastrophe for thousands and a wonderful escape for those who have made millions out of corrupt land deals.
All of this local government failure was supposed to have been sorted out by a policy Ramaphosa has inexplicably clung to ever since Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma sucked it out of her thumb in 2018: the “District Development Model”, a woolly scheme for intermunicipal co-ordination so vacuous there’s still no-one in government who can explain it. Yet it is front and centre of every state of the nation address that Ramaphosa has given. My advice to Motsepe would be to not even bother reading it.
The only cure for this country now is survival of the fittest. Municipalities that can’t survive, can’t spend their budgets, can’t maintain one fire engine, deserve what they get. Local businesses that can, should band together and run their towns — and the poor on the receiving end of the District Development Lie will have to be directly cared for by the state.
A fix isn’t hard. All local elections should be direct. Mayors should stand or fall by their performances. You can either do the job or you can’t. Motsepe will already know that, but Ramaphosa seems not to.
South Africa’s crumbling towns don’t need the District Development Model. To begin again, to succeed, they each need something far more basic: an engineer, an electrician — and a plumber.
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