The surfacing succession battle might signal the ANC's end.

This was published in TimesLive on 22 January 2025

The January 2025 NEC's intense discussions about the election performance and related matters in KZN and Gauteng unofficially mark the beginning of the ANC succession battle journey towards December 2027. The consequential 2026 local government elections, which should be the preoccupation of any imaginable NEC meeting, do not appear to have enjoyed the attention the disbandment or reconfiguration of the two provinces got. The magic question is why the two provinces, when the election outcomes were a consequence of the nationwide performance of the liberation movement. 

The post-1994 ANC established an unofficial convention that the deputy president becomes its president unless the DP opts out, as former DP David Mabuza did. This invariably made the succession contest more about the deputy of the next in line than for the presidency. The break from convention might be why the NDZ17 and NDZ22 failed despite the maturity of the ANC in embracing a woman president at the time. The continuing intensity of the succession battles to have the next DP being a woman has shrunk succession opportunities and made the position of the president available to be contested. 

This state of affairs is already influencing all manner of discourse in the ANC and negatively impacting its recovery from May 2029 and renewal. It is inarguable that the populous provinces of the KZN and Gauteng hold the sway for any ambitious ANC politicians wanting to become ANC president. With no formal announcements on who is contesting for the ANC President position, Paul Mashatile is an institutionalised contender and, thus, the person to be toppled in the likelihood of the availability of a contender. This makes constituencies perceived as his insurance targets of faceless machinery working for the yet-to-be-announced contender to the throne. 

The ANC is a movement of distinctly identifiable generations that have shaped all its epochs as it executed the National Democratic Revolution. The emerging succession battle signifies a convergence of generational interests to lead South Africa, even if it means breaking with the tradition of a generation waiting for its time. This convergence, and unfortunately so, happens at a point when its capability to sustain state power is weakened and will, in the 2027 Elective Conference, make it easier for generational jumpers, including those with funded interests, to raise their hands as ANC Presidential candidates.

Notwithstanding the strong eldership that has sustained the ANC for more than a century, it is gradually becoming tough for older generations to dampen the 'siphata-ngoku-generation' ambitions of 'phating', citing youth exuberance as the only justification to do so. Experience and wisdom-based power are proving more difficult to wield, and fewer are available in society as eldership gives way to the tyranny of impatience. Worse, acquiring power in the ANC is easier than in the past; consider those who gain it by capturing its branches through all sorts of incentives or fleeting influence through social media and other sponsored narratives. 

KZN and Gauteng, notwithstanding that they have amongst their influential leadership members of the 'siphatha-ngoku-generation', are known to have been key in the election of Paul Mashatile to become deputy president in 2022. For all practical purposes, their destabilisation will be the decisive domino to touch for the toppling of Paul Mashatile as heir apparent process to begin. There is a cloud of faceless players, arguably within the NEC, who know that replacing the provinces of KZN and Gauteng as the strategic lobbying centres, each with some power to shape regional conferences' outcomes, will be decisive for the December 2027 outcome. 

The structural advantage that Paul Mashatile's prospect of becoming the next president of the ANC might generate from this cloud of players is a scorched earth approach that might pull the entire ANC into the abyss of complete loss of state power. As happened with the immediate past SG of the ANC, the perception of the power in certain offices of the movement should not be applied outside the need for the power in other offices. The strength of the ANC lies in its checks and balances, including that of its influential leagues. A few solo-driven campaigns have made it to the next phase.

The unfolding process to disband or reconfigure Gauteng, a natural base of Mashatile, and devise mechanisms to strip it of the influence a PEC might have on the succession battle, and to the extent that it might repeated at the regional level, is not innocent. Antiquated as the strategy might be, it will impact the PM27 campaign and, much more dangerously, the 2026 Local Government elections. The assumption that the disbandment or reconfiguration will yield a new leadership is flawed. Paul Mashatile has a track record of Gauteng and arguably provinces constituting the old pre-2024 Transvaal consistently standing behind the PM.

As predicted, the ultimate ideological battles within the ANC will be won or lost through the content, form, and character of the coalition arrangements that follow the announcement of the May 29 results. The GNU, a supposedly tactical manoeuvre by the ANC to cling to state power, already has the SACP's go-it-alone decision as a manifestation of the deeper casualties within the tripartite alliance's ideological complex. The NEC's push to reconfigure KZN and Gauteng might be manufacturing another of the yet-to-be-known casualties of a post-May 2024 election outcome.  

Answering questions from the media, ANC SG Fikile Mbalula explained the relationship of the reconfiguration process with the Provincial Government of National Unity as follows: the ANC is “very clear that the government will not be tampered with, it will remain the way it is. That is the directive of the NEC. We are going to tamper with the ANC leadership; that’s what reconfiguration means within the framework of the ANC constitution”. The inconvenient reality is that there is no way in law that you can ‘reconfigure’ what is constitutional without following its prescribed process. In this case, the two PECs as constitutional structures of the ANC, if not dissolved or disbanded by the NEC as provided, and the NEC did not agree to that process, any other means to achieve the same outcome or effect must be as the constitution of the ANC provides.  

 

As a corporate entity, the ANC, with the added pressure of leading society through its conduct in the threading of a rules-based society, cannot be the one found wanting to violate its constitution. As the judgement in Ramakatsa and Others vs Magashule and Others, “there should be little doubt that the right to participate in the activities of a political party imposes a duty on every political party to act lawfully and in accordance with its own constitution”, the reconfiguration as presented is already signalling a possibility of a litigious process to resolve the interpretation issues. As the majority party in the GNU, the ANC's obligations to the rule of law start with its obligations to the rule of its own constitution. This is the highest of the normative routes it can take on this matter.

 

Without vitiating the interpretation of reconfiguration as explained by the ANC SG, Fikile Mbalula, the standard meaning of reconfiguration is “a process of rearranging a group of things into a new or different pattern.” Its commonly used synonyms include rearrange, recompose, reconstruct, redesign, reform, and reshape. Its transitive verb sense also means rearranging into an altered form. On the other hand, disband means “break up or cause to break up”. If reconfiguration is about rearranging into a new or different pattern, disbandment can be as much a means of reconfiguration as it can be the end state of it. It would be interesting to know whether reconfiguration is not a path to or out of disbandment.

The outcome of these reconfigurations will answer the pending, inconvenient, and avoided internal to the ANC referendum question about which order will define South Africa in terms of geopolitical and economic doctrine. Whilst the ANC might remain a church to accommodate the ideological illiteracy of most of its voting supporters, its core thinkers, activists, and funders will, out of these reconfigurations, know the church that the ANC has become. After all is said and done, "as these battles continue to wreak havoc on the internal stability of the ANC, the opposition complex gets emboldened in its belief that the future belongs to them".