Nelson Mandela was a hard man who played a hard game. What if he was in Ramaphosa’s shoes?

As Nelson Mandela’s birthday approached, I found that without any conscious bidding my mind had embarked on a thought experiment: if Mandela were in Cyril Ramaphosa’s shoes now, if he were president of South Africa facing a truly shocking crisis in the criminal justice system, what would he do?

It’s a silly experiment, I know, both because he isn’t here, and because people, especially unusual people like Nelson Mandela, tend to surprise you.

But I couldn’t help it, and it is partly Ramaphosa’s fault. He is forever invoking Mandela’s name, forever claiming to channel his spirit. Mandela, he says ad nauseum, was the world’s great consensus builder; his ship would not sail until all had consented to board.

This could not be further from the truth. Mandela was a patrician leader, at times even a draconian leader, who steamrolled dissent when he thought it necessary. And he led at a time when it was necessary. During the transition to democracy, he ended the armed struggle in the face of fierce opposition from across the democratic movement. He abandoned nationalisation when the trade union movement and South African Communist Party screamed that he had sold out. He went into these battles fiercely. He was rude, arrogant, insulting. He interrupted people when they were speaking. He was a hard man who played a hard game; he’d been like that all his life.

I would hazard a guess that in the midst of the crisis Ramaphosa is facing, Mandela’s most patrician qualities would have come out. He’d be firing people. He’d be insulting them in public speeches. He would put on that forbidding face of his, his lips in a downturned grimace.

Would it have worked? He managed to drag a volatile movement through a nightmarishly difficult transition to democracy. Could he have dragged it out of the quagmire of criminalisation and violence it finds itself in now? Who knows? What’s left of the ANC may be too far gone for that. What he would not do, I am sure, is tepidly announce yet another commission of inquiry.

Jonny Steinberg in 2023 published Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, on former president Nelson Mandela and his tumultuous marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

This article was first published by The Conversation Africa.

_{Top image: Cyril Ramaphosa and Nelson Mandela at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa. Picture: Graeme Williams/South Photographs.}