City Press, the quality and highly readable Sunday newspaper in the Naspers/New24 grouping, has made something of a speciality this past year or so of tracking the thoroughly scary manoeuvrings of mainly anonymous people in the Jacob Zuma camp inside the ANC and their apparently unrelenting attempts to unseat President Cyril Ramaphosa, first as leader of the ANC and to then arrange Zuma’s recall as head of state.
A successor to Ramaphosa never arises in the stories, which now appear pretty much every week on the front page of the paper. Zuma coming back to rule the party would be highly unlikely, even though the party’s constitution would allow it. But he cannot serve as president again, having had two terms, and the ANC abhors the so-called “two centres of power” situation where the party and the state are run by different individuals.
In theory, the party sends its president to form and run the government, according to party instructions. It has been the party’s highest decision-making body between elective conferences, the national executive committee (NEC) that prevailed on both Thabo Mbeki, and, last year, Zuma, to leave the Union Buildings.
Recently the City Press front page has begun to sound even more threatening. Obviously, because no-one it quotes from the Zuma camp is ever identified it is impossible safely to judge the scale of the threat they are reporting. But it is wise to assume the Zuma “fight-back” is real.
Zuma won an important victory the other day when the High Court reversed a decision last year by the ANC NEC to dismantle the provincial executive committee (PEC) of the ANC in North West Province (for the geographically challenged that’s the one that bumps up against Botswana, has all the platinum, boasts the Pilanesberg and Sun City, and has Mahikeng as its capital and Klerksdorp as its biggest city).
That NEC decision cast one of Zuma’s most powerful backers, Supra Mahumapelo, into the political wilderness. He’d been chairman of the dismantled PEC and premier of the province. Since then he has been central to the plotting against Ramaphosa and was photographed at a meeting with Zuma and ANC secretary-general and Zuma supporter, Ace Magashule, at a supposedly secret meeting at a Durban beachfront hotel last year.
The court ruling, which Ramaphosa has decided not to appeal and, rather, to deal with politically, is a real headache. Mahumapelo was a spectacularly useless premier and he wants his job back. Ramaphosa, facing an election in just over two months, cannot allow that to just happen in a key province where the ANC is being pushed hard by the EFF.
The City Press front page yesterday headlined its story “Cyril vs Supra” and told us that Mahumapelo is insisting on staying in the province he helped bring to its economic knees. It said he had turned down offers of an ambassadorship, a seat in parliament or one on the national council of provinces.
It said the ANC, in meetings with Mahumapelo, had decided to disband the latest PEC and recall a provincial “task team” sent there to sort out Mahumapelo’s mess, particularly in its provincial health services, which he left in a dire state. They would paper over the immediate party cracks by forming a “joint elections team” instead. That presumably would contain both Ramaphosa and Zuma/Mahumapelo supporters.
But there are trickles of politics off the main tributary of the Mahumapelo return that are really intriguing. For one, had the court ruled against Mahumapelo and accepted the Ramaphosa NEC’s contention that he had to go because the party’s branch network was dysfunctional under Mahumapelo, then the Zuma faction could have argued that the result of the leadership election that Ramaphosa won was not beyond challenge.
Second, it is not clear Mahumapelo’s PEC still has any standing. Under normal circumstances it should by now have been replaced anyway. That is not to say he would not have won another PEC election, however. Mahumapelo and Magashule, who was Free State premier and just managed to squeak into the job of ANC secretary-general when Ramaphosa was elected in December 2017, are Zuma’s main warriors in the field.
If there were ever Russian interference in our politics (and lots of people say there is) it would be around supporting these two guys.
In theory, Ramaphosa has the party broadly behind him. The thoughtful political journalist, Jan-Jan Joubert, says in his book Who Will Rule in 2019 that the day after Ramaphosa’s election his people felt they could count on the certain support of 54 of the 86 members of the NEC. If that has changed in any way, it will more likely than not have risen, not fallen.
But that doesn’t protect him from the other threat that flows constantly in City Press reporting — that at the national general council (NGC) meeting in the middle of next year Zuma supporters will rebel against Ramaphosa and have him removed as head of the party.
But this is no sure thing. For a start, Ramaphosa is much more popular than his party. By the time the NGC comes around it will be less than four years to the next general election. Getting rid of him would be a political risk to the people at the NGC itself. And there is no certainty that the NEC would recall him from government.
Second, the NGC is supposed to discuss and update policy, not make leadership decisions. So there would have to be a campaign to get rid of Ramaphosa and if it were to have any effect it would have to be organised well in advance. There would need to be a successor. Who would that possibly be? DD Mabuza, the deputy whose controversial support won Ramaphosa the ANC leadership, would risk dividing the party.
Also, as the City Press stories show, the threat comes always from the same four regions — the North West, the Free State, the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. And you need four provinces to call for a president’s removal at an NGC. While the ANC may be divided in those provinces, the Zuma crowd cannot count on a majority in any of them.
Nonetheless, here’s how the game is being played, week in week out not exclusively but certainly most noticeably in City Press. This is an extract from yesterday’s front page lead: “In the Eastern Cape, Zuma’s lobby group was confident that the ‘marriage of convenience’ between Ramaphosa’s backers and those of [former ANC treasurer-general] Zweli Mkhize was on the rocks and that ‘the provincial executive was divided’.
“A lobbyist said the Zuma group was ‘still solid and making inroads. And our comeback strategy includes winning some of the regional conferences.’
“The lobbyist said the Zuma camp’s revival was one reason why ANC treasurer-general Paul Mashatile ‘found it difficult to deliver the message of support during the provincial manifesto rally’ earlier this month.
“‘Our people can no longer identify with anyone associated with Ramaphosa,’ the leader said.
“ANC Eastern Cape chair Oscar Mabuyane said that there were ‘some anarchists who wished the provincial leadership was divided’. But provincial secretary Lulama Ngcukaitobi said that talk of divisions was ‘just imaginary’.”
Given that the only people named in this are actual ANC officials it is impossible to know who the other voices are. One starts out being a “lobbyist” and then becomes a “leader” or are these two people somehow conflated in the editing process?
How are ordinary South Africans going about their business and paying their taxes supposed to be able to follow any of this. How can the internal politics of a party be so critical to the rest of us. It doesn’t seem right. Certainly it isn’t normal.
So you have to take the newspaper on trust. City Press has been pretty good these past few years and its editor, Mondli Makhanya, has been at the helm of the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Times so he knows what he’s doing. And he writes a wonderful column. And he is most certainly not taking Zuma’s side here. The opposite, if anything. So these observations should be respected.
But I just can’t shake my unease. Anonymous people, it seems from the outside, get the front page whenever they want. The same reporters and the same story, more or less — this time strengthened by the court ruling for Mahumapelo. We South Africans love a good conspiracy theory and I have no idea whether being able to peddle your story without being named adds real potency to your cause or not.
Is the smart and wily Zuma comeback kid story the stuff of myths that turn out to be true or is he the dumb guy who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and can’t face the fact that his war is over?
I don’t know. We know there’s a fight-back, and we know the tentacles of corruption run deep into the civil service. But we don’t know that the tentacles all belong to the same octopus, if you’ll excuse me extending the metaphor.
But perhaps they do. Perhaps it’ll all turn out to be true. Ramaphosa will win the election on May 8 with the support of foolish old white men like me and then get turfed out of office by the Zuma camp next year. The years of darkness and corruption will return. Nelson Mandela is, after all, still the only democratic SA president to leave office on time and as prescribed in the constitution. Running the ANC is not a ticket to political nirvana.
Hopefully, what this reporting is also doing is lighting up the darkness for Ramaphosa. I’m also sure that wherever Zuma slithers his tentacles Ramaphosa will have people watching. He is not the scheming intelligence officer Zuma once was but he isn’t asleep either. He is just trying to put right what Zuma broke.
Yesterday, for instance, he announced the creation of a tribunal, no less, of eight judges to hear and speed up the recovery of money lost to the state through corruption. Eight judges — that’s quite something. According to News24 “these [would be] matters where the [Special Investigating Unit] would ordinarily have gone the civil litigation route to have a government contract declared invalid, or set aside”.
That’s progress, and you can feel the pace of Ramaphosa’s own fight-back increasing. The new head of the NPA, Shamila Batohi, will start taking corruption cases to court soon. And she will soon appoint an investigating director at the NPA, with wide powers to attack corruption. The revenue service, Sars, already has extensive powers to inflict misery on its targets and is beginning to flex its muscle again. Last week it triggered a raid on the house of suspected tobacco smuggler Adriano Mazzotti in Johannesburg, confiscating cars and other property for unpaid taxes. Mazzotti has funded the EFF and EFF leader Julius Malema’s family were at least until recently living on the raided property.
Bosasa, the Watson family business that burrowed its way right into the heart of the state with bribery and other criminality, has gone into liquidation. The coming NPA investigative directorate, Sars and the tribunal Ramaphosa has just appointed will squeeze every penny out of the recipients of the Watson millions. They will be left penniless.
I guess the point of looking at the City Press reporting on the Zuma camp is to remind each other that the country is at war. Or the ANC is, and we are involved, whether we like it or not. It will not end with the election, not by a long way.
It will go on at least until the NGC and probably beyond that, until the next ANC leadership election in December 2022. Ramaphosa has precious little time to fix the things Zuma shattered, perhaps especially the trust we need to have between each other as citizens of the same country.
And there is not enough money and there are not enough skills. But those things don’t matter if enough South Africans stand up against corruption, no matter how well it sings and dances. Civil society needs to find a voice again, even though Zuma has gone. It needs money and support. Business has gone to sleep again, now that Ramaphosa is president. It may regret it.
The City Press reporting tells us that danger is near. We just don’t know how near. We don’t know if that hissing in the grass is a real snake or an old tyre.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.