Cyril Ramaphosa ‘not a leader’

PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa is not a leader but a party agent, according to businessman and political analyst Moeletsi Mbeki.

Mbeki spoke to Lerato Mbhele on Power FM on Monday, where the analyst said that Ramaphosa has one of the best public relations he could think of, but failed as a president.

“Cyril is not a leader really. He was never a leader. He is an apparatchik or an agent of the party but he presents himself as a leader. If you put him next to Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and even Jacob Zuma, he is not a leader because he does not believe in anything.

“He goes with the flow. He wakes up in the morning and says which way is the wind blowing and I am going to go that way,” said Mbeki.

The businessman and political analyst was quizzed on a series of issues affecting the country, including unemployment rate, load shedding, cadre deployment and the state of opposition in the local politics, among others.

Mbeki said the ANC as a collective should be blamed for the country’s failures.

“I think South Africa is a great country. We have a very poor government and many people mistake the government for the people of South Africa or for the country … We have a very poor and under-performing government with all the malaises you have listed as a result of poor government. I think South Africa is still a functioning country and it functions because of the people,” the deputy chairperson of the SA Institute of International Affairs said.

Mbeki is not the first political analyst to have the same sentiments as Black First Land First (BLF) president Andile Mngxitama, who told The Star this week that the president was furthering the ends of white monopoly capital, adding that Ramaphosa was parcelling state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to private hands.

“South Africa is undergoing the normal process of parcelling stateowned entities to private hands by a staged crisis. All these crises are self made. Take SAA and Eskom. Under the Zuma administration wastage and load shedding were ended. The Ramaphosa administration opened the floodgates of gross under-performance to justify privatisation. SAA was sold for R25. Next is Eskom,” Mngxitama said.

Mngxitama added that the Ramaphosa-led government had created this crisis to force SOEs into private hands as the administration was not doing enough to stop the rot taking place across many SOEs.

“The crisis is self-made to precipitate privatisation. We must remember white capital invested R1 billion to ensure Ramaphosa becomes president. It’s payback time for white capital. The current government is the author of the crisis. It will deepen it to complete the gutting of the state and parcelling state owned entities to private hands. We are dealing with a self-created crisis which is functional to feeding the greed of white capital. The current administration shall rest only after all the assets of the state are sold on the cheap to white capital and its black lackeys,” he said.

Other leaders, who have criticised the Ramaphosa administration in recent days include member of the ANC NEC Tony Yengeni who, at the weekend, said the country was in the middle of a crisis and a state of disaster.

“We are in the middle of a major crisis, a real state of disaster … A whirlwind… A tornado…A complete blackout,” Yengeni said on Twitter.