Nkutšoeu Motsau
I have wondered for a very long time, and I couldn’t get the answer, why the ruling party gave us a man like this to be the state president. Now I can see they are groping about again to find his successor. This time around, however, the prospects of winning the elections aren’t as bright as before. They themselves are now talking about the likelihood of losing the elections.
Cyril Ramaphosa is likely to be put up as the next ANC president in their conference in December of this year. This is the man I want to talk about. There is an informal settlement, a squatter camp, that is named after him. A man from Mozambique who had a Spaza shop was once brutality murdered and necklaced in that squatter camp. His Spaza shop was looted and thereafter burnt and razed to the ground. I wonder if he has ever set his foot there! I doubt it very much.
We are told that a day before Nelson Mandela was released from prison that Cyril Ramaphosa was down with flu in hospital. When word reached him that Nelson Mandela was to be released the following day he kicked off the hospital blankets and made a beeline to the Jan Smuts International Airport . He wanted to be there! Like a dutiful marshal he was seen chaperoning Nelson Mandela on the day of his release in Cape Town. This suave and clean-shaven man was the general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers. He was bearded then.
The way he left the hospital is the same way he ditched the miners in their trenches and catapulted himself to land with both feet firmly in the camp of the capitalists. Today we read in the newspapers that he is one of the 15 richest people in South Africa. It has not yet been revealed exactly when he acquired his 10% stake in Lohnmin. But it is known that he used to inspect the striking miners from a company helicopter. With such a stake in the mine, could it have been amiss of him to order that the striking miners be treated as criminals? It is his interests which were being threatened by the striking miners. He was acting in defence of his interests. The man is vicious when his interests are at stake. I cannot forget his brutal and savage mauling down of Mr Molope, a self-made black multimillionaire businessman. When he had finished with him, Mr Molope was down and out, hundreds of millions of rands were gone! Primitive accumulation such as this I have never come across before.
Is it surprising then that this man could renovate his kitchen for two million rands! This is the man who bid up to 18 million rands for a buffalo. This is the man who has bought a small patch of land at the foot of a mountain in Cape Town for 30 million rands where he says he is going to build his retirement home. Already he has a game farm. This is the man they want to be our state president. This is the man who is in the forefront of the war against the so-called triple scourge of poverty, unemployment and inequality!
The ruling party think they can take the people of South Africa for a ride forever!
* The writer of this column, Nkutšoeu Motsau, was born in Top Location in the Vaal Triangle in 1953 and grew up in Sharpeville. He is a tetraplegic as a result of a car accident in July 2005 in Sharpeville and now resides in Cape Town, but still feels a deep rooted connection with the Vaal. Mr Motsau is Chairperson of Azanla MVA.
