President Cyril Ramaphosa is up against some ruthless, amoral people. Can he be ruthless enough to defeat them?
“I’m an enigma, you know,” Cyril Ramaphosa said to Anthony Butler at one point when Butler was talking to him about writing his biography. As Butler recounts in the preface to the book, newly released in its third edition, the president made this comment “conspiratorially”, but it was part of an attempt to dissuade Butler from writing his biography.
Butler got the book done, building into it a great deal of information and providing a comprehensive portrait of the man and the politician.Butler writes that “any subject of a political biography in South Africa must feel some degree of vulnerability”, and there is surely the possibility that Ramaphosa feared it might be a hostile one, damaging to his political career, or that it would reveal things about him that he’d rather not see in the public domain.
After he failed to gain the position of the deputy presidency in the first ANC government, as is well known, Ramaphosa stayed out of public politics for more than a decade. He remained an ANC executive member, but generally kept his head below the parapet. Even accusations that he was plotting against Thabo Mbeki, when Mbeki was president, did not seem to faze him much. They may simply have hardened his resolve and induced him to play his cards very carefully indeed.
Butler describes Ramaphosa’s political development in detail , from the son of a respected Soweto policeman who grew close to Black Consciousness, interacted with lawyers and captains of industry, found his way into the National Union of Mineworkers, and ultimately on to a national stage as internal resistance to the white ruling National Party mounted to a climax in the late 1980s.
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