There are political developments in both Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal which point to the ANC warming to a tie-up with former president Jacob Zuma’s MK Party.
In KZN, the National Freedom Party (NFP) — kingmaker in the provincial legislature — has pulled out of a coalition with the ANC, IFP and DA.
The ANC and IFP are in informal talks with MK to form a government without the NFP — or, of course, the DA.
In Gauteng, the DA has brought a motion of no confidence against premier Panyaza Lesufi over his crime wardens, after the public protector found there was no legal basis for their formation. The EFF, MK and ActionSA have informed the DA that they will back Lesufi and are not open to talks on the motion.
It is surely a sign of things to come. It was probably inevitable that the ANC would eventually turn to Zuma’s MK. He knew it, hence his reference on the campaign trail last year to a “reverse takeover” of the party.
Many inside the ANC willed it too, even though Zuma’s nine years in office resulted in the capture of key state institutions and brought the economy to its knees. The character of the “Zuma ANC” did not change with his departure, despite the shedding of a handful of his acolytes.
A conversation between Mbuyiseni Ndlozi and former president Thabo Mbeki sheds light on the character of the ANC in 2025.
It was the inaugural episode of the African Renaissance Podcast, a project launched by Mbeki’s foundation and hosted by Ndlozi, who was previously a senior leader in Julius Malema’s EFF but left last year after falling out with the party’s top brass.
In his student days, Ndlozi was among the former president’s most vociferous critics. Today he speaks admiringly of Mbeki’s intellect, saying he is a voracious reader who engages and debates with views that differ from his own in a respectful but powerful way.
The FM asked Ndlozi whether his proximity to a former leader of the ANC implied he would move over to that party. His response is startling: “What is revealed [in commissions] is that the ANC is a complete gangster organisation and … it terrifies me. Of all the options, it [the ANC] terrifies me the most because I think one would definitely be killed if they were to pursue the type of politics they believe in.”
This feeds into the trends that were explored in the podcast, and Mbeki’s explanation of the unrecognisable ANC he sees today. Ndlozi wanted to know what had happened in South Africa: the country’s gross fixed capital formation was 15% in 1994, which grew to 23% by 2008 when Mbeki left office. Today, it is back to 15%.
Mbeki reiterated a narrative he has raised before: that the ANC was infiltrated by apartheid agents who took up senior leadership posts in 2007 and remain in the upper echelons of the party to this day. This is why they are unable to admit that in the first 15 years of democracy the country was on a positive, upward trajectory, which is readily accepted even by conservative analysts at the South African Institute of Race Relations.
In the absence of proof, Mbeki enters the realm of conspiracy theories with these allegations. However, his point illustrates that the ANC in 2025 is a far cry from the movement that was at the forefront of liberating South Africa from apartheid.
The ANC’s electoral conference in 2007 put leaders in place “who were not ANC. You have this ANC led by people who are wearing ANC T-shirts, but they are not ANC,” he said.
He cited the ANC’s disregard for the constitution when it comes to political interference, where it crosses the line between ministers and their directors-general or between the minister of police and the national police commissioner, and the bastardisation of the cadre deployment policy. These were among Mbeki’s examples of how the behaviour of today’s ANC is completely at odds with the ANC he knew. Again, he argued, this is due to high-level infiltration by apartheid agents.
The [ANC’s] behaviour began to change. There are many, many, many complaints that you’ll hear about today which were not there in 2000
— Thabo Mbeki
“A change happened and the behaviour began to change. There are many, many, many complaints that you’ll hear about today which were not there in 2000, because you had that particular generation which had been responsible for writing that constitution and the rules and regulations and the laws and everything.”
Mbeki said he listened to the Zondo commission’s evidence on cadre deployment, and the policy described there by President Cyril Ramaphosa and ANC chair Gwede Mantashe was not the same as the one practised by the ANC when it first rose to power.
“The cadre deployment process was not this thing that they’re talking about, where this deployment agency just picks up anybody and inserts them there, and then they’ve got a job,” he said.
Instead, the ANC national executive committee subcommittee on deployment would urge a candidate to respond to an advertised post and that candidate would compete with all applicants, who would be judged by an independent government panel on an equal basis.
“So you’re trying to make sure that in selecting a person you put into that pool, it’s somebody you think can succeed because you don’t want a DG [director-general] of health [for example] who’s going to fail. We want a DG of health who’s going to succeed in terms of the implementation of our policies. It was not a case of [just] deployment. The deployment would be decided by the government structures as to whether this person is suitable to be in this job.”
Whether one believes the apartheid infiltration narrative or not, Mbeki is spot on in that the ANC, the largest party in South Africa today, is not the same as the one which rose to power in 1994. It is effectively Zuma’s ANC; a merge or tie-up with its natural offspring in the form of MK seems inevitable.
