Mathews Phosa's memoir is a bold narrative of political influence and resilience

9 Jun 2025

This book is an elegy to a beloved political party and a failing, if not failed state. Mathews Phosa is devastating in his truthfulness, and stunning in his attempt to be generous to friend and foe alike.

To bring her children up and to provide them with as much supplementary home-schooling support as she could, Reshoketjoe Phosa, Mathews Phosa’s mother, indefinitely postponed the start of her own career as a professional nurse.

She was a natural-born entrepreneur, a biscuit vendor and a maker and seller of ladies’ hats as well as a prize-winning retailer of a popular brand of pyjamas. His father, Paul Phosa, was a teacher, principal and a serial builder of schools in many villages scattered around Nelspruit. This thanks to his artisan training in carpentry, building and plumbing, as well as his training as a teacher.

When Mathews Phosa was of school-going age, his parents sent him back to their own roots — a farm called Polen near Mokopane — where he was raised by his grandfather Mathews Phosa Senior, after whom he was named.

Grandpa Phosa was a devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian who was determined to shelter, cushion and shield his grandson from the “contamination” and the dangers of South African politics.

But guess what: as soon as Matthew Phosa “broke free” from Grandpa’s leash and became a high school student at Maripi High School in 1967, he dived headlong into the furious river of South African (student) politics, only to come up for air 50-something years later.

Phosa’s political memoir Witness to Power is an attempt to narrate and to review, in 18 chapters, his 50-something year journey into politics.

More than a Witness

We must resist Mathews Phosa’s spirited, if also poetic, attempt to have us believe that he was a mere “witness to power” as the title of his latest book and its contents seem to suggest.

I put this to Phosa as we talked about his most recent work, Witness to Power: A Political Memoir, at the “VC Book of the Month” conversation held at the Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria Campus, on 3 June 2025.

The noun “witness” conjures up the image of a curious spectator, a disinterested onlooker, a passive observer, an innocent bystander, an outsider who happened to be eavesdropping, from time to time, or someone compelled, by force of law, to testify.

Phosa was and is none of the above. Not only has he been influential in the ANC, but his influence has been both national and international — putting him on first-name terms with several African presidents.

In this book, he takes special pride in his unofficial role as ANC deal-breaker, kingmaker and king-breaker, as well as his informal roles as adviser and confidante to former presidents Nelson Mandela and Jacob Zuma as well as his close relationship with Thabo Mbeki in exile. He fondly recalls his camaraderie with Cyril Ramaphosa, a fellow student at Turfloop in the 1970s.

Phosa puts a high premium on his relationship with Mandela, who, he suggests, sought his advice on who to appoint as deputy president of the country in 1994. At that time, Phosa voted for Mbeki, we are told. But things would later change.

More than three decades of influence

Phosa bitterly laments in various chapters of his book how former president Mbeki refused to reappoint him for a second term as premier of Mpumalanga. He ruminates over his time as treasurer-general of the ANC, member of the National Executive Committee and his failed attempt to become deputy president and president of the ANC.

After the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference when an increasingly (self?) isolated Mbeki “ruled the country as a lone ranger” and “began to run programmes parallel to the ANC’s national programme”, Phosa took the lead in the formulation and tabling of the unprecedented NEC motion to recall Mbeki in September 2008. This happened moments after Phosa had discreetly approached Zuma, “two seats away from me… and asked him, ‘Mr President, do you still need Thabo?’”

Later when Phosa “witnessed corruption and State Capture under the Zuma presidency on a scale that we could not have imagined when we ascended to power in 1994”, he did more than just speak against it. When Zuma sought his advice on whether to resign or not to resign in their marathon meeting during the night of 13 February, 2018, Phosa advised and persuaded Zuma to resign, which he did publicly, the next day.

Clearly, Phosa cannot meaningfully be described as a mere “witness to power”. Admittedly many may, and some will, disagree with Phosa’s version of what went on in the corridors of power and his precise role in it. But few will deny that he has been influential.

For more than 30 years, Phosa has been a wielder of power even if he did not get to exercise as much power as he may have fancied, for as long as he might have preferred.

For the poet that Phosa is, it is possible that his idea of being a “witness to power” is intended metaphorically — as a teaser rather than a clincher, not so much to denote as to provoke, and not so much impose as to evoke.

Indeed, part of the original meaning of the noun “witness” is taken from the classical Greek word from which we have inherited the word “martyr”. In its original meaning, a martyr is someone unafraid to bear witness even in the face of torture and at the risk of death.

While Phosa may not be regarded as a martyr by any stretch of the imagination, perhaps his fearless denunciation of comrades and foes on matters of corruption and political principle has frequently exposed him to the dangers of character assassination, at least.

Ready to wield power – again?

The heart of this 18-chapter book is in chapters seven (Premier of Mpumalanga), eight (Trouble in [Mpumalanga] Paradise) and nine (Out of the Fold). These are easily some of the most emotional chapters in the book. Phosa seems to regard his tenure as premier as both the zenith and the nadir of his political power.

Though he claims that the matter is water under the bridge, the incident of 24 April 2001 — when the then minister of police Steve Tshwete announced on national television that Phosa, Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale were involved in a plot to harm and/or overthrow Mbeki, only to withdraw the allegations on 4 December, 2001 — appears to remain at once a sticking point and a turning point.

Throughout his book, Phosa tries hard to maintain an air of objectivity and generosity, often finding reason to say something good about all the main characters in his book, with mixed results.

Between, above and beneath the lines, behind and in front of the seemingly benign adjectives and adverbs that are occasionally summoned to describe friend and foe with kindness, the smell of anger, disappointment and fury is palpable across the pages of this book.

This book is an elegy to a beloved political party and a failing, if not failed state. Phosa is devastating in his truthfulness, and stunning in his attempt to be generous to friend and foe alike.

As he winds the book down to a hopeful end, Phosa says: “In my own journey I have tasted both success and failure. After serving my term as premier of Mpumalanga, I was elected to the NEC of the ANC and later served as treasurer-general for a term. My nomination for deputy president did not succeed, nor did my later campaign for the presidency of the party. In success and failure, I have learnt a few lessons about the nature of politics in South Africa. … I stand ready to make a contribution again.”

This passage is part of a repeated refrain in this book of anger and ferocity.

Surely, this book is about more than a mere “witness to power”!

But could it be a political manifesto through which Phosa is announcing his readiness to stand (again) for election and for leadership? Could this be Phosa’s version of Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope (2006), which was an integral but disguised part of the election manifesto that catapulted him into the US presidency in 2008?

Phosa’s Witness to Power may be a statement of farewell to political innocence, but nothing in it intimates, let alone announces, a loss of appetite for political power. DM

Mathews Phosa (with Pieter Rootman) — Witness to Power: A Political Memoir (2024, Penguin/Random House).

Professor Tinyiko Maluleke is the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the Tshwane University of Technology.

Categories:

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

South Africa

More than a Witness

More than three decades of influence

Ready to wield power – again?