It’s only a few weeks to the much anticipated African National Congress (ANC) leadership race. The number of people who want to be president has grown &#8211; unheard of in the 105-year history of the embattled ANC, the oldest party on the continent. President Jacob Zuma, who anointed his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, expressed dismay at the number of candidates who want to replace him. But the party veteran and former acting president, Kgalema Motlanthe, thinks there’s nothing wrong.
“It’s actually an anomaly and I suppose it is also a sign of state of health of the ANC because these contenders are members of the National Executive Committee (NEC0, which issued a directive at the beginning of the year that nobody should mention any names,” says Motlanthe.
Dlamini-Zuma, the former Africa Union chairperson and the country’s former foreign affairs, health and home affairs minister, and Cyril Ramaphosa, the Deputy President of South Africa, are the hot contenders. Ahead of the elective conference, starting on December 16 in Johannesburg, ANC members are at loggerheads. Motlanthe decried the premature announcement of contenders and says it goes against party tradition.
Zweli Mkhize, the Treasurer-General of the party, is favored as a second choice by supporters of Dlamini-Zuma.
“We leave everything to the branches to select their leadership and we make ourselves available. I still intend to be part of that leadership, and therefore we believe that as that collective that will emerge, we will be able to work together to focus on issues that will help to build the economy and ensure good governance,” Mkhize told FORBES AFRICA.
Gwede Mantashe, the party’s Secretary General and one of the most powerful members of the NEC, said the number of contenders was ridiculous, during his address of OR Tambo memorial lecture in September.
“It’s ridiculous because we are an organization, we know one another and we know our capabilities. It’s not just a question of coin tossing,” says Mantashe.
<div id="attachment_34368" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34368" class=" wp-image-34368" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Kgalema-Motlanthe-e1510557506890-300x224.jpg" alt="Kgalema Motlanthe" width="500" height="373" />Kgalema Motlanthe (Photo by Getty Images)</div>
The ANC has been divided since the 2007 elective conference in Polokwane, in the Limpopo province, where former President Thabo Mbeki, who had hinted at a third term, lost to Zuma, the man he fired as Deputy President in 2005. Since then, competing factions sought control of the party. It continued at the elective conference in 2012, in Mangaung, in the Free State, where Zuma easily defeated Motlanthe’s faction.
“The eradication of factionalism is going to be a long process because it is not just a once-off process; it is going to be something that is going to be linked into rebuilding the values, political education and bringing back party education. There’s also action to those who are involved in corruption, those who are arrogant and those who are not serving the community. All those need to be acted upon so that people can be convinced the ANC is working on some of the things it objected to,” says Mkhize.
ANC is riven by all kinds of scandal; from thousands of illegal members in KwaZulu-Natal, the political murders of whistle-blowers and the leaked Gupta family emails implicating ministers in so-called state capture – that is the takeover of government by private business.
“The ANC has been in power for 23 years and what has happened; corruption is very rife, the generosity and selflessness of former freedom fighters has been turned into greed and desire for the acquisition of material benefits which of course creates a sense of grievance in a majority of people who felt left out. Many of our people are not asking for pity, they are asking for opportunities so they can do for themselves what others are doing for themselves. The number of people without jobs has increased,” says Motlanthe.
“When the Constitution was crafted we hoped we would always have people of Mandela’s strong character in office. Now we know better.”
Whoever emerges victorious in December will be put forward as the ANC candidate for the general election in 2019. The party needs a good one if it is to cling to power against the growing opposition.
“It’s a moot question whether the ANC will retain power beyond the December conference. I don’t know if the new leadership of the ANC that will be elected will understand that or whether they will think by using more slogans you can win people, or a well-couched policy position, will crack it. People go by their lived experience. It will take some doing,” says Motlanthe.
<h2>The pros and cons of the main candidates:</h2>
Cyril Ramaphosa – As the Deputy President of the country and the ANC, it is expected he should be the next man in line. The killings of 34 miners in Marikana in 2012 affected Ramaphosa’s popularity in South Africa. He was a shareholder in Lonmin, the mining company that operated Marikana. But he’s seen as a business-minded candidate and maybe a little too close to the boardroom for the unions.
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma – She is one of the longest serving parliamentarians, appointed in 1994 by President Nelson Mandela, she held a string of ministerial posts. Soon after serving as the chairperson of the African Union, Dlamini-Zuma was again sworn in as the Member of Parliament. The fact that she’s the ex-wife of President Zuma, she’s viewed as a proxy of her former husband who could yet face 783 criminal charges.  Dlamini-Zuma could be South Africa’s first female president.
Zweli Mkhize – He is the Treasurer-General of the ANC NEC and for a long time was an ally of President Zuma until he announced his interest to contest for his position. He is one of the favorites of the biggest ANC constituency of KwaZulu-Natal. The fact that he’s vying for the same support base as Dlamini-Zuma will make it tough.
Baleka Mbete – She is the Chairwoman of the NEC and was appointed Speaker of the National Assembly in 2014. Mbete was previously endorsed by ANC Women’s League, but she’s no longer their candidate since Dlamini-Zuma was endorsed early this year.
Lindiwe Sisulu – She’s one of surprise packages. The minister of housing is the daughter of the late Walter and Albertina Sisulu, both ANC stalwarts. ANC Chief Whip Jackson Mthembu and opposition leader Julius Malema called her “politically immature” but she has solid cabinet experience and a famous name.
Jeff Radebe – He is seen as an outsider to lead the ANC. Since 2014, he has served as the Minister in the Presidency. As a cabinet minister, he has served in different portfolios since President Mandela in 1994. In late June, Radebe accepted a nomination from ANC Midvaal, in Gauteng, but ever since then is the quiet candidate whom many are not giving a chance.
&#8211; Additional reporting by Thobile Hans

The Southern Slug Fest

The re-election of Jacob Zuma to lead the governing party of the most powerful economy on the African continent, South Africa, was never a case of ‘if’, instead it was a case of by how big a margin he would beat his reluctant challenger, Kgalema Motlanthe. What was a puzzling paradox for many opinion makers though, was how Zuma got more than 70% of the vote when the African National Congress (ANC) gathered for its elective conference in Mangaung on December 16-20.
Were those 4,500 voting delegates so dumb and ignorant? Could they have been bought or lulled to ignore the stuff that filled newspaper columns, radio and television programs and social networks? How on earth did they miss the groundswell of indignation towards their supposedly highly unpopular and bungling president? In which South Africa did those delegates live, that they could not see what the political analysts, commentators, journalists and opposition politicians saw?
Part of the problem is the fact that the ANC still follows an archaic system of electing its leaders. No ANC leader gets to openly contest, so that they could tell why they believe they deserve the top position. As a result, s/he who controls the levers of power during party election time gets to have an upper hand and, depending on how skillful or cunning they may or may not be, the ANC leadership race is always for them to lose. This is only a small part of the problem. Those chosen become the country’s leaders by virtue of the party’s domination of the political landscape. The bigger problem has everything to do with what has become of the over 51 million people that constitute the population of South Africa.
Greed, self-centeredness and dishonesty have become only some of the defining characteristics of South Africans as wealth accumulation, getting plum positions or ensuring they keep their jobs becomes more important than anything else. In the process they’ve become meek and timid, in many ways a defeated people, blaming everything and everybody other than themselves for crises they find ourselves in. They tend to let their attitudes and emotions, prejudices and prescriptions, stand in the way of appreciating the best that there is.
Take the media and political analysts’ reaction to the election of Cyril Ramaphosa as ANC deputy president. When it became apparent that the billionaire businessman was to become the ANC’s number two, pages of newspapers and magazines, as well as hours of airtime were dedicated to full-blown ‘analysis’ of what he is going to do.
While there’s nothing wrong with someone wishing to communicate their wishes on how the ANC can best utilize Ramaphosa; the most interesting aspect of ‘Cyrilmania’ has been how glibly many have come to pronounce it, without any due regard to both the history of his re-emergence and the inner workings of the ANC.
Business and the elite media’s warmth to Ramaphosa seems to have everything to do with the fact that he represents that acceptable, affable face of the ANC—the one that fits the stereotypical image of a suave, sophisticated, articulate leader who will not embarrass. He is the welcome opposite to the polygamist country bumpkin they see in Zuma.
Almost without questioning, business and rest of the elite seem to think that finally, there’ll be a clever black at ANC headquarters where the party’s top six officials meet every Monday. Ramaphosa, the thinking seems to go, will tell Zuma what no one has hitherto had the guts to tell the 70-year-old struggle veteran about such things as inspiring investor confidence or catering to the sophisticated voter.
The truth is that not only is Ramaphosa nothing more than a benefactor of Zuma’s generosity, he is also a crowning success of his deft strategy. What is forgotten is that Zuma preferred to keep Motlanthe and that it was only after Motlanthe spurned the effort, choosing to stand against Zuma instead, that Ramaphosa came into the picture.
But simply because Ramaphosa was second choice does not mean that he cannot achieve the things that many now think he will be best-placed to accomplish. That’s not to say that Zuma is now suddenly in a mood, through Ramaphosa, to pacify constituencies he considers disdainful and unreservedly hostile. Correctly in some instances, incorrectly in others, Zuma’s comments often suggest a firm belief that most media are hell bent to destroy or undermine him.
What’s habitually forgotten is that only one man has a final say in the ANC and that’s its president. Given the way the ANC operates, the more firmly that person is in charge, as Zuma is now, the more people like Ramaphosa will have little option but to tow the line. The only time Ramaphosa will get reprieve, is if Zuma decides to anoint him. That’s if Zuma won’t seek a third term as ANC president.
In interviews with both men, Zuma insisted that he “definitely won’t seek a third term”. He did not wait for me to point out that after his election in 2007, he said he would serve only one term. Ramaphosa would not be drawn into whether he was keen on the top position. For now its “outside of my wish and imagination,” he told me. When I asked what he thought about the attitude of business towards the ANC, he replied: “The business community has not stepped up to the plate. It has held back”.
In five years’ time Ramaphosa will have the option to challenge Zuma, in the same way Zuma challenged Mbeki in 2007 and won, and Motlanthe challenged Zuma and lost.
While post-apartheid ANC leaders contested positions, often fiercely; they hardly represented fundamentally distinct visions of the ANC and the country.
One is tempted to conclude that ‘Cyrilmania’ is a clumsy, if not hopelessly inadequate effort, largely by those who disapprove of Zuma’s rule. As history has proven, the problem with that practice is that it almost always guarantees that such a move won’t be taken seriously, for ANC leaders don’t take kindly to being told by the media.
Another problem with ‘the government must do this, must do that’ tendency of South Africans is that it also serves to hide the inefficiencies of others who have the power and resources that can move the nation forward, like the country’s business and worker leadership.
Sick and tired, South Africa’s stubborn and resilient workers showed up the country’s lack of, not only political, but also business and labor leadership. Though rudderless, the workers successfully organized a massive wave of sporadic, unprotected, often violent and suicidal strikes. Although the workers lost wages and many lose jobs in the aftermath, they made their point. The ultimate loser, though, is the country’s economy.
Has organized business and labor taken the responsibility they always demand of government? No.
Hopefully South Africans will learn—and that includes the Ramaphosa fan club, which holds influential positions in the media and business—that it takes a lot more to exert real influence in their political economy and to build a nation that will be the envy of the continent. Creating heroes and villains is not the answer but a sure way to failure and disappointment.
Tempting as it might be for everyone to engage in the sport of exposing every wrong about him and blaming Zuma for all of South Africa’s ills, he is definitely not the root cause and the delegates to the ANC conference knew that. Blameless, yes, but he is at best a symbol of what is manifestly wrong with South Africans as a whole.
If there’s a lesson that history should have taught South Africans in the past 18 years of democracy, it should be that their nation stands to gain a lot more if they put themselves to the very test they put their leaders to. Everybody—including business, civil society, labor, opposition politicians, journalists, commentators and analysts—should wake up to the reality that they need to use their energies and the platforms they each have, a little more wisely and creatively. There’s nothing wrong with engaging, a lot more rigorously, but also truthfully.

Mangaung Unpacked

The road to Mangaung, South Africa’s judicial capital, is an uncertain one. Beleaguered, incumbent president, Jacob Zuma (70), is up against his strangely ambivalent deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe (63). Nowadays, no one is even talking about Tokyo Sexwale, a tycoon known to have ambitions to the post but who has just never been able to muster enough support.
Although nominations only opened on October 1, that did not stop warring factions from firing the first salvos, digging up dirt and leaking (mis)information to newspapers about one another. And there is evidence that even though members can now openly talk about, and even circulate list slates and permutations of their preferred candidates, somewhere in some dark alleys and smoke-filled rooms, connivers on either side are continuing to plan the downfall of their opponents, by all and any means necessary.
Not surprisingly, the stakes are high. With an overwhelming parliamentary majority in charge in eight of the country’s nine provinces, as well as the great majority of municipalities, the ANC is mighty. The fight over resources and the dispensation of patronage is therefore a real one. And plots are abound.
In the past year both presidential hopefuls Motlanthe and Sexwale have been subjects of investigations for their alleged involvement, directly or indirectly, in a scandalous UN Oil-for-Food program that involved Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The ANC Youth League, the first group to make it clear that they didn’t want Zuma re-elected, is among those crying foul, alleging that state resources are being used to silence the president’s critics. The league points to the disciplinary expulsion of its president, Julius Malema. The youngsters contend that Malema did nothing wrong and was in fact articulating resolutions of the league when he was kicked out. Malema’s comrades don’t believe that it is sheer coincidence that following his expulsion, the Hawks, South Africa’s elite crime-busting unit, has charged Malema for money laundering; the Public Protector is now investigating him; while the South African Revenue Services believes he may have a case to answer with regard to his tax liabilities. The league’s acting president, Ronald Lamola, says it’s “a political issue” they are going to raise at the conference.
The incumbent is not having any peace either. In October, following a complaint lodged by the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA), South Africa’s Constitutional Court found that Zuma had acted “irrationally” by appointing one “dishonest” Menzi Simelane as the chief of the National Prosecuting Authority.
While Zuma was pondering that, new “looting” allegations emerged detailing how, on top of his rural village, which was upgraded to become “a mini New York” amidst a sea of poverty, around R248 million ($28.2 million) was being spent on a host of other improvements to the president’s private homestead in the area. The president has denied this, insisting his family is spending its own money to do the upgrades, and that the government is only taking responsibility for security, and even then at the insistence of state security officials. The minister of public works, whose department has the responsibility of looking after the residential and security needs of ministers and senior state officials, has however steadfastly refused to divulge the details of both the actual money spent and the extent of the work done on the president’s home.
In an unprecedented move in November, the DA, with the support of eight other opposition parties, tabled a motion in Parliament in which they declared their intention to impeach Zuma. Knowing that it has the overwhelming majority that would prevent such a move, the ANC called it a “frivolous and narrow publicity-seeking gimmick” that will never see the light of day.
The people who have the best chance of deposing Zuma—if they want to—are the 4,500 voting delegates who will be gathering in Mangaung for the party’s elective conference. Drawn from the ANC’s branches, affiliate leagues and members of the national executive committee, they are the ones who will have the job of electing not only the party’s president, but also its deputy president, the secretary general, the deputy secretary general, the treasurer general, the chairperson, as well as 82 members of the powerful national executive committee.
The voting delegates’ task has not been made any easier, though. In a rather outlandish practice, certainly for a party that makes no secret of its desire to lead the continent and the world, neither of the two candidates has to go through any form of interview for the job. The candidates are not required to present to the party faithful any vision of where they intend to steer the party, the country and the continent. In fact, they should not canvass at all. To openly campaign, the unwritten rule goes, is “un-ANC” and therefore frowned upon.
So Zuma’s campaign has been left to pronouncements made by leaders of his home province KwaZulu-Natal who, with 974 delegates to the conference (see sidebar), will have the biggest representation. Following the opening of nominations, the women’s and veterans’ leagues, as well as the majority of provincial executive committees have nominated him—although it must be pointed out that the branches may vote differently to the pronouncements of provincial leaders.
The pro-Zuma group is so confident that they are resisting any compromise permutations that are being bandied about by certain brokers, under the guise of avoiding blood on the floor. The Zuma slate, by the time of going to print, had him staying on as president, Motlanthe as his deputy, chairperson Baleka Mbete and incumbent secretary-general Gwede Mantashe also staying put. Deputy Secretary General Thandi Modise and Treasurer General Mathews Phosa are no longer wanted.
Motlanthe is being accommodated only if he doesn’t challenge Zuma, something he is yet to indicate whether he will do. But he hasn’t said he’s not interested either. At last month’s launch of his political biography, where many expected him to give the clearest indication, he was as vague as he has ever been. While at the beginning of his speech he had his supporters’ hope, talking about “agents of change” and calling for an end to “the notion that so it was, and so shall it be”, he still left everyone hanging when he somewhat abruptly ended his short speech by saying when he dies, eventually, he would like his tombstone to have the words: “Others made suggestions and he implemented”.
Afterwards journalists asked each other about the meaning of what he had just said. No one had an answer. As for the race, it’s still very much on—for better or worse.

Tag: Kgalema Motlanthe

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The Southern Slug Fest

Mangaung Unpacked

The Rocky Road To Power