How Ramaphosa-led government legislates dispossession

PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa has perfected the art of dignified double-speak. 

With calm delivery and a statesman’s demeanour, he presents himself abroad as a champion of justice and equality, while at home presiding over policies that deepen the very injustices he decries.

The irony could not be sharper. At the recent launch of the G20 Expert Task Force on Inequality, chaired by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, Ramaphosa declared with solemnity that “people across the world know how extreme inequality undermines their dignity and chance for a better future.” 

He spoke of soaring food and energy prices, debt traps, and widening wealth gaps. He positioned himself as the custodian of a global project to “combat inequality.”

And yet, like a seasoned illusionist, he gestured toward inequality with one hand while concealing the elephant in the room with the other.

As Mphutlane wa Bofelo has written, the mainstream media thrives on spectacle and suffers from “a deeply embedded amnesia.” This is the political terrain in which Ramaphosa flourishes. 

He counts on the fact that South Africans, exhausted by daily crises, will be mesmerised by the pomp of G20 announcements and distracted by the gravitas of Stiglitz’s presence.

The president’s performance relies on a selective memory: we are asked to forget the lived realities of inequality in South Africa while applauding his role in diagnosing it on the world stage.

Stiglitz himself reminded the gathering: “Inequality was always a choice, and G20 nations have the power to choose a different path.” 

That statement should have hung like a mirror before Ramaphosa. But if inequality is a choice, then we must ask: what choices has his government made?

The answer lies close at hand. Even as Ramaphosa spoke, his administration was pushing through Draft Amendments to the Minerals Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA). These amendments are not abstract policy debates, they are real, daily choices. And their effect is clear: they tilt the playing field further toward large corporations, freeing them to extract wealth for foreign shareholders while leaving mining-affected communities in ever-deeper poverty.

MACUA and other mining-affected community organisations have repeatedly warned that the MPRDA amendment bill will deepen exclusion and poverty.

• No Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC): Communities are reduced to “stakeholders” to be consulted, not rights-holders with veto power. This strips them of meaningful decision-making power over the land they inhabit and empirically results in their exclusion and consequently their poverty.
• Expanded corporate leeway: The amendments ease restrictions for mining corporations, facilitating faster approvals and fewer obligations to affected communities, ensuring that profits continue to flow to shareholders, mostly foreign (meaning the bulk of the wealth generated ends up outside of our economy), while locals bear the costs of displacement, environmental destruction, and health crises.
• Criminalisation of survival: Instead of providing pathways for small-scale and artisanal miners to participate in the economy, the amendments reinforce a punitive framework that criminalises poor black men and women seeking livelihoods outside the corporate-dominated sector and out of pure desperation.
• State capture of benefits: Provisions allow the state to intervene in resource extraction ostensibly on behalf of the “public good,” but without mechanisms to ensure that these benefits flow to mining-affected communities. Experience shows they are more likely to be captured by politically-connected elites.

In short, the amendments legislate dispossession. They ensure that inequality is not an accident of history, but a deliberate policy choice, one made daily, in the full glare of the public, and in spite of countless warnings from those who live with its consequences.

Every clause that strips communities of decision-making power, every line that expands corporate leeway, and every silence on Free, Prior and Informed Consent is a political decision that deepens the wound of colonial dispossession. 

Inequality, in this light, is not a tragic legacy we have yet to overcome, it is a system continuously rebuilt in plain sight, signed into law by those who claim to fight it.

Here lies the diabolical double-bind. At global forums, South Africa pleads for justice; at home, its leaders legislate injustice. Ramaphosa extols human dignity while unemployment in mining regions stands at 70%, while men and women driven by desperation to eke out a living in informal mining are criminalised, and while politically-connected kingpins profit from illicit networks shielded by proximity to power.

But the deception does not stop there. Even domestically, the government multiplies the illusion by staging “National Dialogues”, grand conversations about renewal, reconciliation, and reform, which serve the same purpose as global task forces: to mesmerise the public with the theatre of engagement while side-stepping the substance of change. 

The dialogues promise inclusivity and listening, but in practice they are designed to absorb dissent, to pacify demands for structural justice, and to create the impression of participation without redistributing power.

The President projects justice while administering inequality, trusting that both international spectacle and domestic pageantry will eclipse scrutiny of betrayal.

In a world distracted by the chaos of Trumpian politics, Ramaphosa’s trickery is subtler. He does not rant; he soothes. He does not deny; he reframes. He does not storm the stage; he drapes it in quiet gravitas. And it is precisely in this calmness that his confidence trick finds power.

While Trump thrives on disorder, Ramaphosa thrives on decorum. Yet the result is the same: the manipulation of public attention away from the structural choices that perpetuate inequality.

The real task force on inequality is not the one launched at the G20, nor is it led by Stiglitz. It is the daily struggle of communities dispossessed of their land, poisoned by mining waste, and trapped in cycles of unemployment and exclusion. It is the resistance of those criminalised for survival while elites thrive in impunity.

Until Ramaphosa acknowledges that inequality is reproduced not by global abstractions but by the policy choices of his own government, his dignified speeches will remain what they are: the polished tricks of a confident man.

*Rutledge is the executive director of MACUA-WAMUA Advice Office, not-for-profit organisation that works with the Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA), a social movement that organises and mobilises marginalised and mining affected communities across the country.