JUSTICE MALALA: DD Mabuza is a hungry man

There is a lesson to be learnt from Deputy President David "DD" Mabuza’s flip-flopping in the run-up to the ANC’s December 2017 national conference in Nasrec, Joburg.

That lesson is this: the man believes in nothing, stands for nothing, and will throw his friends and comrades under the bus so long as it benefits his own path to power.

Mabuza is in the news again as he asserts his power as the man in charge of the Eskom war room. After getting rid of the company’s chair, he is essentially the man who is going to throw public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan out of his job. Can he?

His trajectory to the deputy presidency is worth revisiting because, if he succeeds, it teaches us a lot about the person who wishes to inhabit the Union Buildings.

Mabuza was one of the first ANC leaders to show his hand in the battle to succeed Jacob Zuma as party president. Mabuza reached out to three key provincial leaders back in 2015/2016.

The first was Ace Magashule, who had led the ANC in the Free State since the mid-1990s and was running a gangster state in that benighted province; the second was North West premier Supra Mahumapelo, a former Thabo Mbeki supporter well known for bending over backwards to show his support for Zuma so that his past sins could be forgiven. As a convert to the Zuma choir, he tried to sing loudest so his new master would not doubt his loyalty. The third leader was Paul Mashatile, the Gauteng ANC strongman who had been relegated to a junior cabinet role after his premiership and control of the economic heartland of the country.

He sits in the chair that Zuma used under Mbeki to argue that he is ‘naturally’ the next in line

The first two were in support of the so-called NDZ campaign, essentially an attempt to capture Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and install her in power surrounded by Zuma supporters. This was Zuma’s not-so-transparent attempt to be a Vladimir Putin and install a lackey in office.

Months before the conference Mabuza realised that if the Zuma faction of the ANC won at Nasrec he would be in a bind. In the minds of ANC pollsters, and in Mabuza’s mind, there was no doubt what the result of an NDZ win would have been: the ANC’s electoral support would have collapsed. The party would have struggled to win nationally and in many of the provinces. It would have marked the end of the party.

Whoever would have succeeded Dlamini-Zuma, and an SA run by Zuma from the shadows, would have inherited ashes.

That is when Mabuza started making strange noises about "unity" in the ANC and the importance of finding a "unity" candidate so that the party would not be destroyed by contestation between Dlamini-Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa.

It sounds noble, but it wasn’t. Mabuza did nothing to find or encourage a "unity" candidate. He had already made up his mind: Ramaphosa should win so that the ANC would survive the May 2019 general elections.

So, on the night of the ANC elections at Nasrec, and knowing just what a decisive hand he held, Mabuza instructed his Mpumalanga comrades to vote for Ramaphosa. (Many are still asking how the Mpumalanga delegation came to be so big and so decisive — was this where delegates were bought?) That marked the end of Dlamini-Zuma.

The factions still remain and Mabuza still controls Mpumalanga. His allies in the NDZ camp hate him, but after two years those scars are healing. Some may now support him despite their hatred of what they consider his betrayal of their cause.

The man sits in the chair — that of deputy president of the ANC — that Zuma used in the Mbeki years to argue that he is "naturally" the next in line for the top job. No apparent successor is raising a hand from the Ramaphosa ranks. And Mabuza is hungry — certainly hungrier and more cunning than anyone else in the ANC leadership at the moment.

It’s three years to go to the next ANC conference. As the jostling begins, it may profit all of us to remember how Mabuza operates. He is a hungry man and he looks after no-one but himself.