The latest Plan B alternative to Ramaphosa needs to be something more imaginative

We know that politics makes for strange bedfellows. But how kinky can it get? In the past week we have had former presidents Jacob Zuma and Thabo Mbeki, neither a paragon of blameless governance nor unblemished probity, simultaneously let loose salvos of criticism at President Cyril Ramaphosa.

One doesn’t know whether the two men – previously mortal foes – are deliberately coordinating their fire, or whether it’s just grubby political opportunism. Probably the latter. After all, Ramaphosa is on the home stretch to being endorsed for a second term by the rank and file at the ANC’s elective conference in December.

That’s despite a string of serious allegations against the president over large sums of US dollars concealed in the furniture at his Phala Phala game farm. Both Zuma and Mbeki have experienced the humiliation of an early recall. Although it’s petty, it’s also simply human that they would delight in watching Ramaphosa, too, have his nose rubbed in the dirt.

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Zuma’s motives are transparent. He simply hates Ramaphosa who was, he said, guilty of treason and too busy running side hustles. Mbeki’s motives, however, are murkier. He and Ramaphosa were briefly allies of convenience in the battle to oust Zuma, but Mbeki has become steadily disenchanted with Ramaphosa. Whereas he previously made a prideful point of his revolutionary discipline in refusing to criticise his party or his successors, this recently changed.

At the June memorial service for Jessie Duarte, he castigated Ramaphosa. Ramaphosa had “no national plan” and this had caused the potentially explosive situation where “spontaneous civil unrest” triggered by a single event might “spark our own version of the Arab Spring”. There can be no doubt that his June bombshell fed readily into the Zuma narrative.

According to that, an Arab Spring has already been narrowly averted when a “single event”, the jailing of Zuma, caused “spontaneous civil unrest”. Mbeki was this week again at it. Ramaphosa was under “a lot of pressure” because the Phala Phala allegations were the subject of criminal, Reserve Bank, public protector and parliamentary probes.

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Given the possibility of impeachment proceedings, the ANC leadership had no option but to discuss whether it would ask Ramaphosa to step aside. KwaZulu-Natal, North West and Limpopo leaderships have all decried these “unprecedented attacks”. And presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said that while Ramaphosa valued engagements with the former presidents, particularly with Mbeki, he expected that they would approach him privately if they had criticisms.

Ramaphosa and his supporters are aware of his vulnerability. The drip feed of damaging allegations continues from Zuma’s radical economic transformation faction and will likely reach a crescendo before the December conference.

Mbeki’s broadside took place at an annual strategic summit held by former president Kgalema Motlanthe’s foundation. Although none of the other participants was as specific in their criticisms of Ramaphosa as was Mbeki, there was much talk of precipices, chasms, abysses, and imminent national collapse, with the consequent need for alternatives.

The problem with all these proposed Plan Bs is that they appear to be premised on changing the ANC from within. What none of these well-intentioned people is yet able to concede is that the ANC cannot be reformed or, at least, not in time to avoid South Africa’s collapse.

It’s worth remembering that Ramaphosa was the intelligentsia’s Plan B to get rid of Zuma. And Zuma, in turn, was Plan B to get rid of Mbeki. The latest Plan B alternative to Ramaphosa needs to be something more imaginative than what’s gone before.

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