Jacobin Magazine: From Zuma to Ramaphosa

Yet perhaps what Zuma will be remembered for most is the Marikana massacre. In August 2012, police gunned down, in broad daylight, thirty-four miners in the northwest city. The ANC government and their allies in COSATU and the SACP claimed that the murdered workers were “criminals” who, aided by potions, charged the police in a suicidal frenzy and thus deserved to die. Evidence later emerged that ANC politicians (including Ramaphosa) had pressured the police to intervene in the strike and that the massacre was not a tragic accident, but a premeditated act. As a member of the mine’s board, Ramaphosa sent an email saying the strike was “dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such.” His conclusion: “there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation.” [...]

It also bred a new class of politicians who acted like old-style warlords. Violence became inseparable from politics, especially in Zuma’s home province of Kwazulu-Natal. Between January 2016 and mid-September 2017, at least thirty-five people were murdered in political violence related to ANC rivalries there. The ANC itself counted eighty of its political representatives killed between 2011 and 2017. At one men’s hostel in Durban, the largest city in the province, eighty-nine people were murdered between March 2014 and July 2017 in acts of political violence. Almost no arrests have been made. [...]

Zuma’s regime was rife with instability. He regularly hired and fired ministers (he averaged one finance minister per year) and kept on ministers who caused harm and despair. He governed in a highly personalized manner, simultaneously speaking about his reign as if he was an outside observer and using his power to hollow out or capture any part of the state that might threaten his interests or those of his vast family, or of the Guptas. Everyone was expendable to Zuma; his closest allies in his journey to the presidency — such as Blade Nzimande, former general secretary of the Communist Party, and, crucially, Julius Malema, former ANC Youth League firebrand — would also become Zuma’s greatest enemies. [...]

What Ramaphosa represents at one level is a return to the classic ANC model of social compact, putting forward a collective vision that favors developmental capitalism, collective aspiration, social harmony — but by and for elites, at the expense of workers. Indeed, while COSATU and the SACP supported Ramaphosa’s campaign, Zuma broke the back of these once proud organizations and Ramaphosa will most likely be able to pass pro-business policy without facing any real opposition from the Left.

read the article

The New York Review of Books: South Africa’s Cattle King President

Ramaphosa is a Soweto homeboy, the son of a police sergeant, who now lives in a grand home in Hyde Park, one of Johannesburg’s wealthiest suburbs. He qualified as a lawyer—no mean feat in apartheid South Africa—but his roots are in the labor movement and he played an important part in the downfall of the apartheid regime, mobilizing mineworkers. He has long been an avid fly-fisherman and now owns a cattle-ranch. When I profiled him for a South African newspaper in 1996, just after he left politics and joined the country’s largest new black-owned business, New Africa Investments, I described him as “charming and unflappable, entirely in control”:  [...]

I have followed Ramaphosa’s career for three decades. I was astounded by his skills in the 1990s, when he led the ANC’s negotiating team, thrilled at the possibility that he would be Mandela’s successor, and then disappointed by his hubris when he flounced out of politics: he refused, even, to attend Mandela’s inauguration in 1994. When I wrote that profile two years later, I was warily interested in the way he was leveraging his political credibility to gain a place at the high table of industry, as a beneficiary of the official policy of “black economic empowerment.” But some fifteen years later, in 2012, I was—like so many South Africans—distressed by the way he used his political connections to insist that the police take action against a wildcat strike at a platinum mine in which he held a stake. In the resulting “Marikana massacre,” thirty-four striking miners were killed by police, in an echo of the 1960 Sharpeville shootings. [...]

Even if these regal cattle and this glossy book are signs of swagger, or hubris, Ramaphosa has always been intensely conscious of his image. I have no doubt that there is a plan to the way he has cultivated his cattle-obsession and put it into the public domain. Released in the middle of his leadership campaign, Cattle of the Ages is Ramaphosa’s equivalent of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. “Somewhere in the depths of my soul is the connection my father had to his cattle, the hills of Khalavha and his people,” he writes. “My love for cattle could be a reflection of my father in me; or some form of agency on behalf of my father, Samuel Mundzhedzi Ramaphosa,” because as “in most African cultures, cattle are a sign of wealth and stature among my father’s people,” the vhaVenda. Samuel Ramaphosa had tended his family’s herd but he had no opportunity to acquire his own, as he was forced in the apartheid era to migrate to the city for work. [...]

In his victory speech on Thursday, Ramaphosa diverted from his prepared notes to address the party congress’s standout resolution: to revise the country’s constitution so that land could be expropriated, without compensation, for redistribution to black South Africans whose ancestors were dispossessed by the 1913 Natives Land Act. When black people lost their land, he said, “poverty set in, because our forebears… [had] led a fulfilled life from the land. They were able to feed their families. And when the removals and dispossession took place, poverty became a partner to the people of our country.”

read the article

Haaretz: Israel's Warming Relations With Africa Survived a UN Vote. But Will Further Political Tension Break Them?

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) just "unanimously resolved to direct the South African government to immediately and unconditionally downgrade the South African Embassy in Israel to a Liaison Office" as an "expression of solidarity to the oppressed people of Palestine,"  in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Furthermore the ANC called on the Palestinians "to review the viability of the two-state solution." [...]

In September, the Israel-Africa summit scheduled for October in Lomé, Togo was cancelled. According to Israel, this was due to widening unrest in the West African nation. Official Palestinian sources claimed that a boycott campaign was instrumental in its cancellation. According to the Johannesburg-based Afro-Middle East Centre, under half of all African nations were likely to attend. [...]

Israel has, since 1960, more than quadrupled its average income per capita (in real terms) to nearly $34,000. Sub-Saharan Africans have increased their average wealth just 1.5 times over the same period to just over $1600. [...]

First, Israel is keen to diversify its pattern of trade. Currently there is a lot of upside in relations with Africa, given Israel’s total trade with the continent is less than that it enjoys with Vietnam alone. And, second, for Israel, better relations with Africa offer diplomatic protection and votes, especially at the United Nations. That contention is now going to be tested.

read the article