Ramaphosa's chances in succession battle are grim

Where do the tumultuous political and legal events of the past two weeks leave Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, the man seemingly destined to be the political bridesmaid, never the bride?

Ramaphosa, who may reasonably be called one of the midwives of the constitution so splendidly upheld this week by Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, has since the early '90s been the politician with the most promising career. Yet, events have always conspired to keep that promise from being realised.

The sharks are circling in the choppy, blood-dimmed waters of ANC succession , and Ramaphosa last week put his hand up when he set out two basic tenets from which a campaign might flow.

The Constitutional Court's body blow to President Jacob Zuma may well have stolen his thunder, and the so-called Zupta camp's playing of the "white monopoly capital" race card may capsize his boat, but Ramaphosa made two very important statements last week.

He told an ANC summit for academics and professionals in Johannesburg that broad-based BEE must be intensified and that state capture must be stopped. Those two issues are strong bases from which to launch a bid for power in Luthuli House and the Union Buildings.

The Zuma/Gupta camp certainly took notice and immediately played the trusted Zuma two-card trick of race and victimhood.

First, Zuma used a meeting of the ANC national executive committee to lambast an unnamed ANC NEC member whom he said had met billionaire Johann Rupert.

ANC insiders immediately understood Zuma to have taken aim at Ramaphosa, the man he brought in to give respectability to his leadership ticket when former deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe abandoned ship at the Mangaung ANC elective conference in 2012.

Zuma supporters immediately took up the battle formation which has worked so well for them in the past. On cue, the president's trusted son Edward trooped down to the Nkandla police station to file the unlikely complaint of "state capture" against Rupert - a classic attempt to reverse the toxic accusations currently being spewed at the occupier of the Union Buildings' top spot.

And when the police told Edward that although "state capture" is a potent insult, it does not constitute a criminal charge, he filed a complaint of "corruption" against Rupert - a man whose listed companies' tax records are easy to check and provide the state with more tax income (much of it earned abroad) than the rest of the JSE combined.

Why would a core member of the Zuma clan claim to have indisputable knowledge that a meeting between Ramaphosa and Rupert took place when both say they have not seen each other for years, and can prove it? Why alienate Rupert, who has opposed apartheid publicly since 1970, has helped create thousands of job opportunities for black South Africans through Business Partners Limited since 1981 and at present finances, from his own pocket, the studies of 135 South African students, of whom only five are white?

The reason is the tried-and-trusted Zuma strategy of diversion through ethnically tinged victimhood. It is not about Rupert at all. It is about putting the tar brush to Ramaphosa - or anyone else - who could threaten the power of Zuma and his vassals. It is about the growing evidence of Zupta state capture, "Zupta" being the new addition to the political lexicon by the EFF to show the overlap of interest and influence between the Zuma and Gupta families, perhaps best illustrated by the garish South African of the Year awards the Gupta-controlled ANN7 TV channel broadcast last year.

Watch it if you haven't. It must be seen to be believed.

The underlying logic to the "white monopoly state capture" argument seems to be that if the Zuptas cannot disprove state capture, they will cast the president as the victim of a much bigger plot of state capture, by whites nogal, as if that would make Zupta state capture somehow less bad.

To no one's great surprise, Edward refused to divulge the supposedly iron-clad "facts" of the meeting between Ramaphosa and Rupert contained in the affidavit he filed at Nkandla. Some might guess they could fold as pathetically as other claims by the Zuma inner circle have over the years when the force of judicial fact-testing has been applied to them - the Hefer Commission, the Crawford-Browne arms deal case and, this week, in the Constitutional Court.

In fact, this week's damning and clear Constitutional Court verdict may steer Ramaphosa's two-pronged leadership offer of opposing state capture and supporting BEE way off course. It has weakened Zuma's standing in the ANC to the worst type of political support imaginable, based purely on interest, patronage and largesse rather than principle. It is the kind of support that will evaporate with power into a joint discovery of communal conscience and amnesia, when the leader is rejected by those who once feted him. It is brutal and sudden. Just ask Thabo Mbeki.

But until that moment of Zuma's inevitable fall from grace, Ramaphosa will know that any battle for power will be fought on two fronts: inside and outside the ANC. He does not stand strong on either.

Inside the ANC, Ramaphosa's undeniable attributes have always been overshadowed by his lack of a constituency. Even now, when Zuma's inner circle must surely realise they lost the moral argument the moment the chief justice, through his phrasing, effectively found Zuma in dereliction of his oath of office, that inner circle would be loath to hand the keys of power to Luthuli House and the Union Buildings to someone as far removed from the patronage network as Ramaphosa.

And Ramaphosa knows that as long as the internal ANC coalition between KwaZulu-Natal and the premier league of Mpumalanga, North West and the Free State holds, the maths is against him obtaining the ultimate leadership prize.

For the patronage network to hold, Zuma must either be left to limp along as ANC leader through the flawed logic which allows the ANC Women's League to back both Zuma and the Constitutional Court, or another candidate from the Zuma patronage network must be found to keep the network going. But for Ramaphosa, who is seen as a stalking horse for ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe anyway, the internal leadership outlook is grim.

It looks no better for him outside the ANC.

His ascent to leadership would mean Christmas every day to the EFF, which has already tarnished his brand by association with the Marikana massacre and the nicknames McBuffalo (a sellout to white cultural capture through game farming) and McDonald's (a sellout to corporate capture).

Questions about Ramaphosa's indirect coal interests raised by the DA also remain largely unanswered.

In the final analysis, the revelations of Zupta state capture and the damning findings of the Constitutional Court have opened up opportunities for South Africa's perpetually most promising politician, who has put his hand up with a two-pronged policy approach. But his old handicap of lacking an internal ANC constituency, coupled with a definite vulnerability to outside attack, will probably result in that perpetual promise remaining substantially unfulfilled.