LITMIR.BIZ

      On 18 December 2017, Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa clenched his hands together and tried to blink back his tears. But his efforts were in vain as tears welled in his eyes. He had just won the ANC presidency by 179 votes after a long, complicated and hard fight. The ANC was by then in tatters and the country was in crisis. The South African economy appeared to be unfixable and the institutions of state were on the verge of collapse.

      The country, even the world, looked to the four thousand ANC delegates gathered at the Nasrec conference centre to the south of Johannesburg for a sign that all was not lost. ANC leaders would later say that the level of public interest in an internal party election was unprecedented. But the ANC was the majority party in South Africa and would be so for the foreseeable future. This meant that the person who won the ANC’s top leadership position would be in charge of the state.

      And that’s what happened. Two months later, South Africa saw the accession to power of its fifth democratically elected president since 1994. After weeks of political turmoil and anxiety over the future of the country, Jacob Zuma resigned as president, opening up the way for the newly elected president of the ANC to take over the reins of power. It was as if the restart button had been set on the country after almost a decade of Zuma’s rule.

      Political developments often happen at a rapid pace and we are unable to fully digest their impact and make sense of the political dynamics. It is also difficult to connect the dots between these developments in a way that helps us understand what they mean for the country. Based on my own reporting, interviews with newsmakers and months of my following Ramaphosa around, Balance of Power is an effort to reflect on South Africa’s recent history and Ramaphosa’s central role in it.

      In this book, I piece together Ramaphosa’s rise to political office and discover what it took to get him there. I include never-before-told accounts and anecdotes of the horse-trading and manoeuvring in the run-up to the Nasrec conference and insider views of what really happened. I also tell the story of Zuma’s last days in office and how he clung on to power almost like a dictator who feared to have his day with the law.

      This book also takes a closer look at the transitional period that followed Ramaphosa’s election as president in February 2018 until the 2019 general elections. That transitional period was characterised by efforts to clean up the state, fix ailing institutions and revive the economy. But as Ramaphosa set out to do just that, he was thrown many curveballs, from both within the ANC and externally. He had to balance competing interests, play to his political strengths, mitigate his political weaknesses and take account of the effects of global issues constantly.

      Ramaphosa’s election as president will define the near future of South Africa. His election was hailed as a ‘new dawn’ in an explosion of optimism and euphoria about the prospects of this country. But can one man fix years of corruption and lawlessness by himself?

      Chapter 1

      The return of the ‘prodigal son’