Ramaphosa has unsteady grip on S Africa’s ANC

Bloomberg

Cyril Ramaphosa, the newly-elected leader of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, has a tenuous hold on power in the party after his allies fell short of securing outright control over its top leadership body.
A lack of support from a clear majority of the 86 voting members of the ANC’s National Executive Committee will limit his scope to drive policy changes and assert his authority over President Jacob Zuma, whose second term as the nation’s leader ends in 2019. The NEC is the ANC’s highest
decision-making body in between its five-yearly national conferences.
The faction led by the candidate he beat in the presidential race, Nkos-azana Dlamini-Zuma, probably has the loyalty of about 45 of the 86 NEC’s voting members, said Xolani Dube, a political analyst at the Xubera Institute for Research and Development in the port city of Durban. “Cyril is a very
compromised president,” Dube said
by phone. “He is not running the administration of the ANC. He has got a serious problem.”

RAMAPHOSA’S CONSTRAINTS
The executive committee’s composition will constrain Ramaphosa’s ability to focus the government’s agenda on promoting economic growth, creating jobs and cracking down on corruption. His victory over Dlamini-Zuma for the presidency was by the smallest margin since the ANC came to power in 1994, and only two of the other top-five party officials elected with him are considered certain allies. The rand weakened as much as 0.5 percent before trading little changed at 12.7142 per dollar by 11:28 a.m. in Johannesburg, bringing its gain since before the start of the ANC conference to 6.2 percent.
In his first speech as ANC president, Ramaphosa pledged a crack down on graft, which has become increasingly rife during Zuma’s almost nine-year administration. “Corruption has to come to a stop and it must happen with immediate effect,” Ramaphosa said. “We must confront the reality that critical institutions of our state have been
targeted by individuals and families.”

STATE INFLUENCE
The nation’s graft ombudsman indicated that members of the Gupta fam-ily, who are friends with Zuma and
are in business with his son, had been allowed to influence the awarding of cabinet posts and state contracts.
Zuma and the Guptas deny wrongdoing. Ramaphosa didn’t directly link Zuma to wrongdoing in his speech,
and instead thanked him for his service to the ANC.
He reiterated the party’s resolutions to implement “radical” economic policies to give the black majority a bigger state in the economy and provide free tertiary education to some students. He affirmed the party’s decision to seize land without compensation to speed up land reform, but said it would only be done in a responsible manner that didn’t harm the economy, agricultural production or food security. “We must ensure that we do not undermine the economy,” he said.

NEGOTIATING SKILLS
Ramaphosa will need all his skills to negotiate the sometimes perilous eddies of ANC policies. The lawyer, who co-founded the biggest mining work-ers union, led negotiations to end apartheid and became one of the richest black South Africans.
He also played an important role in the Northern Ireland peace process, carrying out secret inspections of Irish Republican Army arms dumps with former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari that helped to push negotiations forward.
Among his backers elected to the NEC were former finance minister Pravin Gordhan, who’s dismissal by Zuma in March drew a rare public rebuke from Ramaphosa and resulted in the nation losing its investment-grade status with two ratings companies for the first time in 17 years.