It is the Cyril Spring, the New Dawn, a New Deal that was flaunted somewhere in the presidential campaign, the sunrise industries in the State of the Nation Address by the new president… A new national mood rules, South Africa’s political ground is shifting and there is hope that the door has shut on the Zuma years. The bottom line: a thousand blossoms seem to be blooming.

Yet, the Cyril Spring is tentative and tenuous. The designation “season of unresolved contradictions” is as apt as “season of hope”. The unfolding changes need to be consolidated. President Cyril Ramaphosa has to deal with ambiguous materials and personalities, in party and state. Policy execution must follow to engender economic rescue, in chains of contingent economic rescue developments. The president himself is a set of unbundled contradictions.

Not all political contradictions require resolution. Some can co-exist in a state of prolonged, healthy tension. Others, like many that hover on the Cyril Ramaphosa to-do list, beg for resolution. They threaten to undermine the now reinvented (so Zuma’s departure seems to suggest) ANC and its plans to show that government can be done better than in the Zuma years.

The onset of the post-Zuma epoch has been generating hope last seen at the time of the 1994 transition – and who cares to remember that brief and hopeful season in the wake of Jacob Zuma’s 2009 ascent to power? As a sobering counterfoil to the new hope, there is the reminder that the House of Zupta may be in ruins, but that much of the ANC neighbourhood of capture remains standing: regiments of acolytes and beneficiaries still permeate political and bureaucratic structures of government.

The anticipated new order will stagnate as a promise unless these contradictions disappear. The changes would need to confirm all of clean government (which will have to include reprisal for past abuses of public resources and damage to the economy, public institutions and the body politic), and substantive improvements to the lives of poor, hungry and unemployed South Africans. It is through change to the lives of both those who have been “eating” public resources, and the lives of those who continue to be hungry physically that the Cyril Order will flourish, or not.

As contradiction extraordinaire the Zumaists and Zuptoids now appear as either new converts to the Cyril Spring or as Zumaist turf-centred diehards. The converts hope that their refrain of “we have work to do for the ANC” will solicit political protection; the Zuma loyalists hope that silence and the mantra of “ANC unity and factional reconciliation” will make them untouchable. The New Dawn-ism may make the neighbourhood fade somewhat, but override is unlikely. A cynical and sensitised citizenry is not going to allow the New Dawn to sweep this one under the carpet.

Ramaphosa himself is the epitome of contradictions; he might very well have the skills to handle the conflicted ANC. To challenge former president Zuma for power, he had to work from inside that ANC faction for a considerable time. His full story of challenging for power might one day resolve questions of contamination and complicity – but that is unlikely until this round of ANC wounds (victors and victims) has healed. Ramaphosa is also conflicted through simultaneous embeddedness in the working and rhetoric of financial markets, investment, and ratings, on the one hand, and people-centred “radical economic transformation” on the other.

It will be government practice over time that might show whether Ramaphosa, more than his presidential successors, has been able to forge a union between these poles. Is it possible that the ANC’s proximity to electoral defeat in 2019 (possibly allayed by the ascent of Ramaphosa) will bring elitist class forces in the ANC to work with convincing commitment to change citizen lives more than in the preceding 24 years? Or, will the new hope – and forgiveness for the years of Zuma and the Zumaist ANC (and the Mbeki ANC before that) – create a new arrogance of invincibility?

Ramaphosa brought people-centredness into Parliament afresh when he closed both his State of the Nation Address and the SONA debate. First he stepped up to forge hope and a social compact. Then he emphasised Parliament as a place of the people, reminding his MPs (the majority of whom were defending Zuma in a motion of no confidence a mere six months ago) of their previously neglected mandate: that the redress of poverty and dispossession is at the heart of Parliament’s work. His seemingly sincere voice gained credibility from the fact that kleptocracy, capture and corruption had been the contrasting antecedents. These contradictions will probably have to be resolved through the clean-up of government and ANC deployment at all levels, unless MPs own up and commit to “doing time” through extra work for the people.

It becomes difficult for the presumed new ANC to assert its new identity when (as in the present) the tasks that it has to execute are the exact ones that the opposition parties and civil society watchdogs are demanding. This includes “fire the Zuptoid Cabinet members” to do justice and demonstrate commitment to new government. Ramaphosa’s conflict is that he needs to do this without making it appear as if he is ceding initiative to the opposition. It relates to the core of contradictions that Ramaphosa has to work with – cleaning up government while attempting to create a new ANC out of contested material.

Within the ANC one of the Ramaphosaists’ main balancing requirements is to get the Zumaist provinces and their substructures not to go into rebellion. The last week’s noises from, for example, the ANC of eThekwini, signalled that the Zumaists are playing the intra-ANC challenge game of “tell us the reasons”. Ramaphosa’s balancing game is to cut through the pretence and protection of Zuma, while fulfilling his ostensibly primordial mission of keeping the ANC together. The bridge of keeping the ANC united while overseeing judicial action against the corrupted regiments is still to be crossed.

With new ANC-Ramaphosa power still conflicted and tenuously consolidated it’s notable that in the last week Ramaphosa was on two displays of warm relations with the South African Defence Force. Among others, he thanked them for not involving themselves in politics. With much of the police and intelligence apparatuses corrupted and possibly available to the highest bidders, Ramaphosa needed to flash some of his confirmed power bases.

Perhaps the final contradiction of this evolving transition to a Ramaphosa order is the exact practice of debating the transition, the pros and cons of the new leader, cautioning that Ramaphosa is not necessarily the saviour sent to rescue the ANC.

Is there a line in the sand to tell when the debate on the rising order is critical reflection, and when it falls into the den of Zumaist hit-back strategy? DM