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".
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