Picture File: President Cyril Ramaphosa. Picture: AFP/Ahmad Gharabli
President Cyril Ramaphosa wielded a stick and a feather in reshuffling his Cabinet – the process became a delicate balancing act to deal with his party dynamics.
He is known for wanting to please all sides within the ANC, including its alliance partners, Cosatu and the SA Communist Party.
The Cabinet changes proved the president was able to consolidate his support in the ANC, a process that began soon after the ANC national conference at Nasrec in December 2017, and to keep his ANC renewal project intact.
He had to appoint Paul Mashatile as his deputy and retain former cooperative governance and traditional affairs Nkosazana Minister Dlamini-Zuma against his wishes.
Although he had a constitutional discretion to appoint individuals of his choice into the executive, he feared the backlash if he excluded Mashatile and Dlamini-Zuma. He would have antagonised Gauteng, Mashatile’s home province, and started a messy fight with Mashatile himself if he had sidelined him.
READ MORE: Cabinet reshuffle shows Ramaphosa still puts ANC politics before needs of SA
An unwritten rule is that the ANC deputy president becomes SA’s deputy president and subsequently the next president. Mashatile was elected at Nasrec last December, via the slate of Zweli Mkhize, who lost the race for ANC presidency.
He wouldn’t have appealed to KwaZulu-Natal and had no plan to oppose Ramaphosa. KZN’s main idea was to win Gauteng over to vote for Mkhize and abandon Ramaphosa, who is from Soweto.
Gauteng would not budge on its stance to back Ramaphosa. But besides the fact that Ramaphosa has a good heart, including reaching out to his opponents, he had little choice but to appoint Mashatile, despite his links to Mkhize.
Since the Phala Phala debate vote in parliament, Ramaphosa had been under pressure to fire Dlamini-Zuma, but he preferred to retain her, albeit in a low-key portfolio of women, youth and people with disabilities. Instead of dismissing her for the collapse of the many municipalities under her watch, he replaced her with veterans of local government politics, Thembi Nkadimeng as Cogta minister and Parks Tau as one of her two deputies.
Nkadimeng and Tau once served as presidents of the SA Local Government Association and Tau is a former mayor of Joburg.
By replacing her with experienced members, it was an admission by Ramaphosa that Dlamini-Zuma had failed in her job but could not be fired because of her sensitive political background.
By voting against the president – her boss and employer – she committed the ultimate offence in politics. Ideally, she would be the first to be shown the door.
But her background as a politician from KZN helped her to escape the axe. It is not difficult to know why he dismissed former tourism minister Lindiwe Sisulu.
Although her “offence” was to merely publicly criticise Ramaphosa over a number of issues, including Phala Phala, Sisulu was an easy target.
She had no real constituency, whether from the ANC Women’s League or KZN, and not even from the radical economic transformation elements within the ANC.
It is for this reason Ramaphosa used a feather against Dlamini Zuma and a stick against Sisulu. Sisulu’s dismissal and that of Deputy Minister of Public Enterprises Phumulo Masualle was symbolic to pass a clear message to those who opposed Ramaphosa that they must shape up.
KZN is important in Ramaphosa’s strategy to make sure the province is always happy.
In addition to pampering Dlamini-Zuma, he hired another KwaZulu-Natal politician, Sihle Zikalala, as minister of public works.
Ramaphosa has been tactical in his approach to deal with his enemies and consolidating his support, while avoiding a direct confrontation with his opponents.
He hired Zikalala also to snub the KZN ANC leadership, which re[1]called him as premier and offered him a lower position of an MEC.
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