Tag: President of South Africa

EPA-EFE/Siyabulela Duda/GCIS HANDOUT Saturday’s official funeral for the world to say a final farewell to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was always going to be a political affair, saying much about our politics of the day. But he may well have been upstaged by President Cyril Ramaphosa who has probably provided the best diagnosis of our problems yet delivered by a sitting politician. This is the kind of thing we have come to expect in our politics. In other words, this was, for almost everyone involved, a unique opportunity to make a point while reaching a previously impossible audience. In the end, many people were simply waiting for Julius Malema to speak. One must question why Malema used this stage to make this particular point. The people who attack them on Twitter did not do that, and have no experience or insight into what that must have been like. Ramaphosa was able to offer something very few politicians have given us recently: an accurate, thoughtful and caring diagnosis of our problems. Malema’s critics would no doubt suggest that it demonstrates that he can be relatively easily upstaged, that while his emotion, which is almost always anger, can be effective, the presentation of a thoughtful solution is also effective politics, especially in the long term. Ramaphosa is the man in charge, he is the one with real political power.