By using Machiavelli to diagnose Ramaphosa and the ANC’s leadership, Tony Leon argues that they have achieved the worst possible outcome – neither feared nor loved by voters.

The works of Niccolò Machiavelli – the medieval Florentine philosopher and diplomat – are still cited as a how-to manual for effective leadership in all realms.

Machiavelli’s reputation as purveyor of cynical, even amoral, advice on ascending and then maintaining power is baked into his reputation. But he was also thoughtful.

Were Machiavelli to be resurrected in the cratered landscape of today’s South Africa, he would find little need to adjust or even update his working theories on effective leadership.

Machiavelli’s most (in)famous advice to rulers for maintaining the state was that “it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both”.

No love

On Monday, leaked polling from the DA suggested a complete absence of love for the once mighty ANC in its one-time urban fortress, Johannesburg.

Nearly 20 years ago, in 2006, the ANC obtained 61% of the vote.

The ANC are now polling at around 20% support.

It’s easy to dismiss this as opposition mischief, but that the report in Business Day contained an extraordinary quote from an unnamed “Luthuli House staffer”.

The insider advised journalist Hajra Omarjee, “Our information shows that the ANC could get as little as 12% [of the vote] in Johannesburg. The leadership of the province and the city are accountable, as they refused the national leadership advice to enter a coalition with the DA.”

Matters have reached an interesting inflection point.

DA polling overstates ANC support, compared with the ANC’s even more dire numbers.

Given the collapse of infrastructure, corrupt tenders, and the abysmal failure of delivery in the once sparkling City of Gold – both sets of numbers, whether 12% or 20%, seem credible.

Loveless might be the relationship between the ANC and its deserting voter base, but what about the other half of Machiavelli’s axiom of power: the fear factor?

When the ANC was at its zenith in the early 2000s, obtaining over 60% of support in Johannesburg, then-president Thabo Mbeki held the whip hand. Internal dissent, public disagreement, and party debate were alien to the party’s modus operandi.

The 2001 parliamentary investigation into the 1998 arms deal was the birth mother of the corruption scandals which today populate every page of every newspaper and website.

Back then the ANC – using its presidential and ministerial muscle – prevented Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) from pursuing a full-blown investigation into the irregularities in this multibillion-rand deal. Instead, the ANC forced through Parliament an exculpatory joint report, largely authored by Cabinet members, not parliamentarians. It was described off the record by party dissidents as “heavily sanitised”, “watered down”, and “a whitewash”.

What is striking, comparing those times to these, is how the ANC in public reacted to the event. It did not.

Frustrated by the refusal of his party to launch a full-scale investigation, in 2001 ANC MP Andrew Feinstein resigned from Parliament in protest. It was only six years, after he had left the party, Parliament, and even the country, that Feinstein felt secure enough to expose the levels of corruption and its concealment in his explosive 2007 book After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey inside the ANC.

Fear of the president reached its apogee under Mbeki as the muted nodding through of the arms deal proved – and the stifling of any dissent against the leader’s diktat.

This all unravelled in 2007 when this suppression of internal opposition led to Mbeki’s ejection. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

‘Fokol’ fear

But if we are to learn some hard lessons from that era, what of current times when the pendulum has so swung in the other direction.

Now, the president’s authority is so slight and his will so weak that key members of his Cabinet, his security chiefs, and his party leaders freewheel and freelance with frolics of their own.

Today you are spoilt for choice in finding much evidence of Cyril Ramaphosa’s writ in evidence.

In the Mbeki-era, the code of omerta (an appropriate Sicilian word for silence much used by the mafia in its heyday) was the order of the day. Now, party dissent is in full public view.

On Sunday, the egregious Malusi Gigaba, unblushing from his own personal and political scandals, told the media that as an national executive committee (NEC) member he was free to denounce the party’s direction and its unity (or lack thereof).

He advised the Sunday Times that the NEC had “failed in its objectives” and lamented the party’s decision to coalesce with the DA, thus unsubtly unstitching the GNU fabric weaved by Ramaphosa.

Fellow NEC member, now temporarily relieved of his policing duties following claims that he was in hock to criminal elements, Senzo Mchunu, went further. He stated, mirroring the poll numbers cited above, that the “ANC was on the brink of collapse”.

Apparently both dissenters will be “disciplined”, but if past form is anything to go by, they have little to fear.

Ramaphosa got a lot of public stick when he said in 2020, he “would rather be seen as a weak president than to split the ANC”. In 2025, he seems to have achieved both.

Matters take a much more serious turn when the defence chief of the country can freewheel with foreign forays that impact devastatingly on the country’s foreign policy alignment, and its economic prospects.

Despite presiding over an SANDF that has barely one seaworthy ship and only one or two fighter aircrafts in service, and that abandoned its troops in foreign fields, General Rudzani Maphwanya enjoys high flying to troubled hotspots.

In remarks in Iran, he pledged to strengthen military ties (with what, one could ask) with the dictatorial regime in Tehran – arch nemesis of Trump with whom we are involved in delicate trade talks with. He was quickly denounced by the Presidency at home.

“The general should have been a lot more circumspect… the visit was ill-advised,” chastised Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya. Apparently, consequences would follow. Don’t hold your breath.

Fearing nothing from her appointing authority, Ramaphosa, Defence Minister Angie Motshekga defended both the visit and her general’s remarks.

Day of judgment

Meanwhile, over at the National Dialogue – another Ramaphosa flagship – kicked off amid acrimony and stolen sandwiches. Suggestions are that the president is better off conducting a national dialogue with his dysfunctional, often warring GNU first.

Here, too, Machiavelli offered a less famous piece of useful advice for leaders. He drew a distinction between fortuna, the fickle and uncontrollable flow of events, and virtu – which Edward Luce defines as “a leader’s ability to exert some sway over destiny through his qualities of courage, skill and ruthlessness.”

Claiming to be victims of world forces beyond our control (Trump tariffs), and local history (apartheid), locates the ANC and its leadership firmly in the fortuna camp.

When the country leadership offers a dose of virtu, such as some homegrown economic reforms, the outcomes range from modest to unimpressive. Lack of courage, skills and ruthlessness at the top are in short supply and have accounted for this.

Business Leadership SA’s new “SA Reform Tracker” notes that out of 240 reforms promised by Ramaphosa’s government, just 26 are complete; 59 indicate “strong progress”; 100 are “on track but need attention”; and 19 are completely stalled.

Plunging poll numbers, freelancing generals and party leaders, stalled and incomplete reforms, economic perils like no growth to vast joblessness, and rampant crime and corruption – is a long bill of indictment.

The day of judgment approaches when the voting public – now out of love with a ruling party whose own members no longer fear its writ – renders its verdict.