While the furore around the Phala Phala scandal continues, and will probably only be decided at the ANC’s conference that starts next week, it has already revealed important aspects of our politics. One of these is the fact that so many have reacted so emotionally to the prospect of President Cyril Ramaphosa leaving office shows the role personalities play in our world of today. 

This also shows just how closely intertwined personalities and politics have become, moving from the old policy-laden debates and firm ideologies to celebrity fights and their singular interests. In today’s world, it appears entirely rational for voters and investors to watch personalities closely, simply because what happens to them individually has a decisive impact on policy, and therefore on our future.

It also suggests that those who predict “broad policy continuity” should Ramaphosa leave office may be wrong.

In the hours after the publication of the findings of Parliament’s Phala Phala panel, the rand started to lose strength. On a day when the US dollar finally started to weaken, the rand still lost value.

Meanwhile, many members of our muttering middle classes displayed their concern. Some tweeted their defence of Ramaphosa, others phoned talk radio stations to claim he was the victim of the “RET thieves” in the ANC.

Ramaphosa’s opponents have been even more emotional.

Some could not contain their apparent glee at his predicament. Cogta Minister Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma appeared to be prepared to completely abandon a principled position. Just three weeks after claiming the ANC’s “step-aside” rule was unfair, she called on Ramaphosa to resign.

All of this shows how important many perceive the personality of Ramaphosa to be to them. It is about more than him personally, it is also about the policies that he espouses.

In some ways, he had become a symbol of the fight against corruption, and to attack him was to support the other big personality of recent times, former president Jacob Zuma.

But at the heart of this may be the belief that if Ramaphosa were to leave office, our country would change for the worse.

Changes in personalities have had a huge impact on our politics before.

The ANC’s Polokwane conference appeared to be a fight between the Gear and Aids policies of Thabo Mbeki against the more consultative and leftist policies of Zuma.

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The sacking of Nhlanhla Nene

But perhaps nothing explains the link between personalities and policy more than the sacking of Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister in December 2015.

The value of banking shares fell by nearly 20%, the rand lost significant value and business panicked. The only way to repair the damage was to replace Nene’s replacement, Des van Rooyen, with someone who symbolised clean governance. At the time that was Pravin Gordhan.

One of the key issues of the moment is that while it may be that Ramaphosa does not remain President for long, the ANC will not, and cannot, state that current government policies will continue to be implemented.

In other words, current government policies do seem completely intertwined with Ramaphosa.

This is despite the fact his successor would come from the same party. It may be expected that a party has policies and implements them no matter who is in charge. 

It is surely for precisely this reason that the ANC has a policy conference in the first place, along with policy discussion documents and branch meetings on the issue. And it has resolution after resolution on policy.

Those resolutions can often be completely dependent on a leader.

If Zuma had been ANC leader when the party resolved to expropriate land without compensation, that might well have been implemented. It is surely the case that the biggest reason it was not, was the election of Ramaphosa as ANC leader.

But the ANC has shown many times in the past that a change at the top can lead to a complete change of policy.

In 2008, when Mbeki was recalled, Barbara Hogan was appointed as health minister, replacing Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. It meant a complete change in policy towards HIV. It could be argued that when Ramaphosa took over from Zuma in government, much changed too.

If it was not this way, why would it have been so important in 2015 to replace Nene with Van Rooyen and then to replace Van Rooyen with Gordhan?

It would seem the real fear for some now, is that if Ramaphosa left office, policy would change again. This time, probably, with regard to corruption.

Personalities symbolise factions

This also underscores the nature of the ANC, that it has become so completely factionalised that personalities symbolise factions, and in turn indicate which policies will be implemented.

It also suggests that the ANC is not really a political party, but a group of competing parties within some kind of umbrella organisation.

While this may appear to be highly critical of the ANC, it should be remembered that it is not alone in terms of how personalities personify policy.

It seems likely that if Julius Malema were to depart the political stage, the EFF would cease to exist as a force in our politics. Certainly, it appears that other people who occupy leadership positions in that party almost always agree with him in public. There is virtually no evidence of differing viewpoints on policy in a debate within the EFF.

In the DA, the departure of Mmusi Maimane and the election of John Steenhuisen was an important symbol for some voters that the party was changing.

The same happens in other countries. The US might be a different country if the Republicans were not obsessed with Donald Trump, the British Labour Party changed dramatically under Jeremy Corbyn, and Brazil has been convulsed by the battle between President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro.

In many ways, this has always been the nature of democratic politics: the leader of a party has always been vital to its fortunes. And a leader becomes a party leader through the success of their faction (or in the case of recent British politics, the failure of the Liz Truss faction).

But there may be a tension between this reality and the rhetoric of what almost every party states. They all appear to claim that the policies are the work of committees and conferences and consultations.

And yet it is obvious to everyone that who is the leader of a party matters and that it can be crucial to the decisions of voters.

Currently, there is at least one rating agency which has suggested that there would be “broad policy continuity” if Ramaphosa were to leave office in the near future. But that appears to run against our recent history.

It may also prove ultimately to be untrue. DM