I don’t buy the story that co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma is part of or leading an ANC faction that is taking on President Cyril Ramaphosa.
This theory got legs after Ramaphosa’s announcement that cigarettes would be allowed from May was overturned by the cabinet and proclaimed by Dlamini Zuma.
Two years after Ramaphosa became president, analysts still refuse to accept that he is a consensualist. Even though he had already made the announcement, when the debate over the cigarette ban was reintroduced in the cabinet, he allowed it to run.
Finance minister Tito Mboweni has already declared that he was hot to get the wine flowing.
"I didn’t like the continuous ban on tobacco and alcohol," he told MPs. "But I lost the debate and therefore I have to toe the line."
Who would have supported Dlamini Zuma? First in line was police minister Bheki Cele. He said in April that the alcohol and cigarette ban was one of the regulations he wished would continue beyond the lockdown.
"My first prize would be that we shut down alcohol," he said.
This is where the factions story loses steam. Cele was one of Ramaphosa’s key lieutenants in the ANC’s 2017 presidential contest and was responsible for organising against Jacob Zuma in KwaZulu-Natal. Mboweni did not appear on the Ramaphosa list of nominees for the national executive council. He was on the Dlamini Zuma list.
Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma was never really a Zumaite anyway
My assessment is that Dlamini Zuma has long moved on from the Zuma faction and is one of the more dedicated members of the Ramaphosa cabinet. She will be 75 by the time the next election rolls around. Does she want to campaign for ANC leadership and contest an election in 2024? I doubt it.
My theory is that the ANC will never get rid of its factions. At the moment what used to be the Zuma faction is weak and disorganised. Zuma is finally before the courts and likely to take a pummelling. Many of his supporters are not the genuine article, as justice minister Ronald Lamola pointed out in February when he called some of them thieves hiding behind the idea of radical economic transformation (RET).
"These thieves that have stolen money … Now they want to claim that they are [for] RET and they are forces that are supposed to help our people," he said.
The next iteration of an anti-Ramaphosa faction is being built, but it has no leader. The ANC Women’s League is beginning to walk away from its support for Zuma, but it is still anti-Ramaphosa. There has lately been a rash of "virtual public lectures" by members of the league in various provinces. Many of these are nothing more than the beginnings of an anti-Ramaphosa campaign.
Another leg of this faction is in the Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA). In the past it was a key link to Zuma (it received huge funding and shares in the Gupta family companies) and MKMVA president Kebby Maphatsoe was a leader of the Zuma faction. Now Zuma is gone. The Guptas are history. Maphatsoe is no longer deputy minister of defence & military veterans. Until March 13, this faction was mobilising MK veterans, and recruiting nonveterans, to launch a new structure which would be a Trojan horse to take on Ramaphosa. The conference for the new structure was shelved due to the coronavirus, but it will be back.
The truth of the matter is that the ANC is in transition. Ramaphosa is stronger while those who would challenge him are still trying to get their ducks in a row. Dlamini Zuma may yet be in play for this faction, but I strongly doubt that this will happen. She was never really a Zumaite anyway. This is someone who stood with Thabo Mbeki against Zuma in 2007. She is just not one of them.
All this is uninteresting until you ask yourself: how is the ANC going to take this country out of the devastation of Covid-19 into a winning economy if it remains so divided? Where will a coherent Marshall Plan come from?
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