The investor's warning the ANC ignored before taking power

Munzhedzi Frederick “Zorro” Ramovha, a lawyer and activist-poet, warned the ANC about a political economy risk before it ever took office: a movement that wins unchallenged power, funded by the unconditional loyalty of its supporters, becomes a poor steward of both the state and its own moral capital. His warning has been forgotten.

Ramovha’s foresight rested on first-hand observation of what unaccountable power returned to other liberation movements. During the 1980s he went into exile in Zambia and Zimbabwe, where he watched governments such as Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF and Zambia’s United National Independence Party, once in office, turn corrupt, incompetent and repressive. The lesson he drew was essentially one of governance risk: when voters reward leaders repeatedly on the basis of past “struggle” records rather than delivery, parties and leaders behave like God, above the law, without morals and with unchecked violence, safe in the knowledge that supporters will keep voting them back in regardless of their failures.

Additional reference context is available at https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/2026-10-06-the-forgotten-anc-poet-activist-who-warned-the-party-about-power/.

He joined the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, while in exile, and moved in anti-apartheid writers circles, mainly the Congress of South African Writers. After the unbanning of South African liberation movements in 1990 he returned home, studied law at the University of the Western Cape with a bursary from the ANC, worked as a public prosecutor in the Northern Cape, and later returned to his home region in Venda, Limpopo, to practise law. He died in November 2011 after a long illness.

His poem Soul Raid is an anatomy of how newfound power corrupts former liberation leaders. “All hypocrites are right … The spirit of Judas seems to reign supreme, pushing honourable man’s dishonesty to the extreme … Silence plod my conscience like a soldier’s boot and alone I sit and vainly brood,” he writes. Ramovha describes unchecked power as a “poisonous pill” handed to liberation leaders by their supporters, one that destroys the moral soul of the party. “Beware! This is a soul raid aimed at destroying beyond repair.”

The cost of that bargain, in his view, would eventually fall on the party’s most valuable asset: the trust of the masses. Ramovha, a supporter of the ANC, feared the moment of truth when voters finally realised the extent of their leaders’ corruption, moral decline and blame-shifting. In Moment of Truth he writes: “When the moment of truth comes I shall hide away from this cruel reality, in a bid to distance myself,” and “When the moment of truth comes, my life may lose all purpose of existence.”

Former ANC leader and president Jacob Zuma captured, for Ramovha, the arrogance of leaders who take electoral support for granted when he said the ANC “will rule until the second coming of Jesus”, irrespective of whether the party delivered on its promises. Ramovha’s apocalyptic vision for South Africa under a failing ANC rested on precisely that dynamic: corrupt, incompetent and morally depraved leaders sustained in power by a struggle record rather than performance. In Just Now he writes: “Just now I shall lie down and sleep eternally … Just now I shall close my eyes after a fruitless strenuous search of a future of darkness that holds for my soul nothing but tantalising dreams.”

Born in 1955 in Tsianda village in rural Vhembe, Ramovha matriculated from Dimani High School in Thohoyandou in the old Venda homeland. He registered for a law degree at the University of Venda before leaving for exile. At UWC, where he arrived older than classmates fresh from high school, he was known for the poem Oh African Child, recited at many political rallies. It summed up the hope of a better life for many black South Africans as the collapse of apartheid first looked like a reality: “Daily you dream about that day, the day that you will mourn no more … the day justice will replace injustice … Oh African child.” Recordings of his recitals are held at the Mayibuye Centre at the University of the Western Cape Archives (https://mayibuye.robben-island.org.za/…/Sound-and-Oral…).

Meanwhile, as an old university friend of the author, Ramovha threw himself into student activism. He served on the editorial collective of the award-winning Student Voice newspaper, was active in the South African Students’ Press Union and the South African National Students Congress, and was a leading member of the UWC Creative Arts Society. Younger colleagues on the collective, among them Julian Jacobs, now teaching journalism at Rhodes University; the late Chris Matlhako, former deputy general secretary of the SACP; photographer and curator Ingrid Masondo; and gender activist Rene Lewis, a member of UWC’s Kopanong black feminist collective at the time, often playfully teased the serious, solitary figure, who laughed easily and recited poetry, beer in hand, on production evenings.

He remained a strong proponent of racial reconciliation, cautioning that opportunists, populists and hard-liners among blacks and whites were deliberately weaponising racial differences for personal and political benefit, or plain racism, ethnic nationalism and tribalism. In Wait Not Till Dusk he writes: “Brave Cowards Fear Their Own Shadows,” acknowledging that “my quest for reconciliation was tested and tried” but that “still, my heart is free of hate”. He narrowly missed being the imbongi, the traditional praise-singer, at Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inauguration; fellow Creative Arts Society member Zolani Mkiva was appointed instead. In 1994 Ramovha co-authored the poetry volume The Labour-Pains and Joy (UWC Press) with Petros Tserere, Leviticus Mendlula, Mark Botha, Looks Matoto and Kaya Somgqeza. Other poems include What A Confused World and Song of Hope, “this song will be my soul’s antibiotic”.

Ramovha’s core insight was economic in the deepest sense: political capital spent without accountability is eventually exhausted. The ANC ignored the poet at its own cost.

Professor William Gumede was editor of Student Voice and former head of the South African Students’ Newsagency, and author of Restless Nation: Making Sense of Troubled Times (Tafelberg).