The changing face of Matamela

Almost 30 years ago, when I arrived in South Africa, I was enchanted and thoroughly impressed by the men and women known the world over as anti-apartheid heroes.

They had taken over just three months earlier, as elected officials under majority rule, and were enjoying a honeymoon with their people. While ordinary South Africans loved them, the rest of the world admired them for their resilience and eventual accomplishment.

I was more than ready to join that honeymoon, not just because I was really on my own personal honeymoon but because the joyful expectation among South Africans was truly infectious.

The new leaders were on our TV screens and on almost every newspaper or magazine cover daily, and one couldn’t help but follow their every action, as majority rule unfolded.

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But it wasn’t long before I began to feel disappointed with some of their actions. When the first gay parade took place a few weeks after I arrived in the country, I couldn’t believe it, especially when every news commentary said that was the very first time it was happening. In the apartheid days, the rulers never favoured such an aberration.

The Mandela administration was apparently delivering a dividend of democracy to the perverts who make up the LGBT community. But why something so bad that even the evil masters of apartheid could not approve of?

Then came the “gravy train” controversy. Apparently, the new leaders had engaged a consultancy firm to determine what their salaries and allowances should be. When the firm suggested what was described as “Malaysian pay packages” for the new MPs and they accepted it quietly, South Africans were incensed.

Bishop Desmond Tutu echoed their feelings when he publicly chided Mandela and Co. for accepting to live like their predecessors, the white minority rulers.

He told newsmen that the new leaders had “stopped the gravy train just long enough to get on”.

It so happened that when they were campaigning for election, the ANC candidates had promised to stop the ‘gravy train’ that the white rulers had been enjoying at the expense of the black majority.

Nelson Mandela quickly reacted to Desmond Tutu’s criticism by giving up a sizeable percentage of his pay and ordering the sharing of what remained, among some charities he identified with.

He didn’t ask for everyone’s salary to be reviewed nor did he force anyone else to do what he did. Mandela just did what he felt was right.

At this point again, my hero worship took another plunge. I didn’t expect the new leaders to live way above the ordinary citizens of their country; especially given their shared history of suffering under apartheid.

While all this was going on, not much was being heard about one person who was one of South Africa’s anti-apartheid icons. He was a youthful member and the first leader of the country’s umbrella Labour movement, COSATU (Congress of South Africa’s Trade Unions).

Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa was the leader of the ANC negotiation team at the conference which led to majority rule. He was an activist right from his student days and had achieved a lot as a labour leader.

Most people thought he would be the first vice-president under majority rule and were surprised at Mandela’s preference for Thabo Mbeki.

Whether it’s because of that or for another reason, Cyril Ramaphosa wasn’t too visible on the political scene during the Mandela administration.

He, however, showed up on an unexpected horizon, in the business sector. Suddenly Ramaphosa had landed himself directorships and even chairmanship of big companies in the country.

He became so much a part of corporate South Africa that whenever I read about him after we returned to Nigeria, it is to hear that he had completely turned his back to the people and the labour movement he had fought hard to nurture, in pursuit of his corporate interests.

When my husband returned from a trip carrying a big biography of Cyril Ramaphosa, I knew I won’t go anywhere near that book, let alone read it. I was that disenchanted.

Long afterwards I never heard anything positive about him. I’d begun to believe his was a lost case. Then suddenly the announcement that Mr Ramaphosa had returned to politics in South Africa.

And the rest is history.

But even in politics some of his actions left a lot to be desired. His corporate connections and indifference to the fate of miners, his former comrades, weren’t winning him accolades.

Somehow he survived politically. Even the farmhouse cash controversy couldn’t bring him down. On the international scene he is a key player in BRICS, and is standing tall in Africa for that.

But the one thing that propelled him to greatness is undoubtedly the case for genocide against Israel that he took to the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

In a world where the powerful countries are determined to side with the oppressors, where international bodies are too lame to impose sanctions on murderous Israel, where Arab nations are too afraid or indifferent to the pains of their Palestinian brothers to rise in their defence, Ramaphosa’s government rose with heroic determination and took Israel to court.

Though the ruling of the court is symbolic, no one will be able to enforce it without American and European backing, it serves to put on record that what Israel is doing is indeed a genocide as seen by the rest of the world.

It is a great moment for Africa that an African country defied the odds and took untouchable Israel to task over its mindless savagery, in the current war against Palestine.

With this bold achievement, South Africa is the true giant of Africa nay, the Globe. It has taken a step for humanity, which no other nation dared to take. The man at the top of this global accomplishment is Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa. He has gone from a young activist/freedom fighter to a labour leader, a political negotiator, a corporate icon, a full politician, a statesman and now a global activist.

This last bit has won him worldwide acclaim and it’s my hope that he’ll continue to stand his ground on similar issues affecting other humans around the globe.