President Cyril Ramaphosa this month enters his eighth year as the country’s head of state.
If he holds on for a further 24 months, he’d become the first president to be at the helm of the Union Buildings for 10 full years.
Nelson Mandela chose to leave office after only one term due to age and his firm belief that it was time for his generation — which had been at the forefront of the resistance struggle against minority rule — to hand over the reins to younger troops who would lead the reconstruction of the country.
His successor, Thabo Mbeki, was ousted from office in the middle of his ninth year following his defeat in the race for the ANC’s leadership a year earlier.
As fate would have it, the man behind his removal, Jacob Zuma, was himself forced to resign from office just as he was entering his ninth year as the country’s president. Karma?
Zuma’s ousting meant that Ramaphosa — who had been his deputy — would finish off the remainder of Msholozi’s term, as the ANC had decided against having another stand-in president like when they roped in Kgalema Motlanthe when Mbeki left.
This means that if Ramaphosa does stay in office until the end of his current term in 2029, he would have been at the helm for 11 years.
A great feat for a politician who took over the reins of the ANC with the smallest of margins, had to run a cabinet that was almost half made up of Zuma loyalists — some of whom were initially hostile to the president — and whose second term was at the mercy of opposition parties who joined him in forming a coalition government after he and his party could garner just 40% of the votes in the last general elections.
But surely Ramaphosa’s legacy cannot just be that, against the odds, he somehow managed to serve more years in power than any of his predecessors.
So what would be his legacy?
Perhaps the question is premature, given that — theoretically — we still have at least three more years of his presidency ahead of us.
But certainly the “Ramaphoria” that greeted his first few months in office has long fizzled out, replaced by a lot of disappointment and scepticism.
Much of this had to do with how he managed the state capture debacle, with many of his critics blaming him for the fact that many of the politicians and senior officials who were implicated still roam the streets and the corridors of parliament free — some of them even ended up in his cabinet.
His wait-and-see approach to scandals that broke during his tenure in office has earned him a reputation among some as a weak leader who doesn’t take decisive action until he is certain that it is a win for him.
But his backers say all of this criticism is unfair and based on a misunderstanding of the man’s approach — that he doesn’t act hastily because he believes in due process.
But once those processes are followed through, there are consequences.
They point to examples such as that of Ace Magashule, the erstwhile ANC secretary-general who tried to start an internal rebellion against Ramaphosa but ended up in the wilderness.
They also point to several ministers and other top politicians who have been forced to leave office or step aside after being criminally charged.
“That did not happen during the state capture years,” one Ramaphosa backer told me recently.
And then there are the commissions of inquiries he has allowed to operate unhindered even though they exposed the worst of the ANC’s skeletons in government.
The Zondo commission didn’t just expose what Zuma, his Gupta cronies and their lackeys had done during the “state capture years”, evidence provided there led to Ramaphosa himself calling the party he was now leader of “accused number one” in corruption.
Despite clear evidence that the proceedings at the Zondo commission — some of which happened during the Covid-19-related lockdown when most people were at home and had nothing much to do but watch live TV testimonies — played a role in eroding the public’s trust in the ANC, Ramaphosa agreed to yet another potentially image-damaging commission after KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s damning July 6 media conference last year.
If the Zondo commission exposed how the Guptas and others had crippled public institutions, the Madlanga commission into Mkhwanazi’s allegations is weekly shining the light on the criminal rot that throttles policing in the country.
Though it still has weeks to go before concluding its investigations, few would deny that what the Madlanga commission has shown us is that criminals have infiltrated the highest echelons of the police management and, potentially, had two police ministers in their pocket.
As shocking and heartbreaking all of this is, it is good that it has been exposed to the public so that the rotten apples in government and the police can be rooted out.
Some say another head of state, worried about his own survival and that of his political party, would not have allowed for such transparency — that they would have used all the means in their power to frustrate such processes and hide the dirty laundry from the public.
Should we then credit Ramaphosa for letting it all out in the open? Is that his legacy so far?