As things stand, President Cyril Ramaphosa has a decent chance of being re-elected ANC leader in December.
History is on his side. Since the party came to power in 1994, no sitting ANC president has failed to win a second term, if he wanted it. In 2002, then president Thabo Mbeki was re-elected unopposed.
Ten years later, his successor, Jacob Zuma, easily won re-election despite a challenge from his then deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe.
But even if we ignore this history, no formal ANC structure has so far shown any appetite for campaigning for a different candidate ahead of the national conference that takes place at the end of the year.
Instead, what we witnessed this week were party structures in Limpopo — including the provincial executive committee yesterday — publicly declaring their support for Ramaphosa to continue as ANC president beyond this year.
What is perhaps significant about the Limpopo pronouncements is that even regional leaders that were said to be unhappy with Ramaphosa, for instance in Sekhukhune, have publicly thrown in their lot with the president.
In other provinces, the national leadership succession debate so far seems confined to the other five top ANC positions, with various names being put forward to challenge for the post of party deputy president, national chair, secretary-general, national treasurer and deputy secretary-general.
But this is not to say that there will be no presidential contest. A few ANC leaders are, without a doubt, keen on challenging, but are likely to read the mood of various provinces before declaring their intentions.
The one exception is party veteran and tourism minister Lindiwe Sisulu. She has not publicly declared that she’ll be running this time. But her presidential ambitions are obvious as she was one of the candidates in the 2017 race that ended with Ramaphosa being elected ANC president.
She may be battling to get an ANC structure of significance to publicly endorse her right now, but this has not stopped her campaigners from putting her name out there and from making her political platform public.
That she’ll be going for what detractors consider to be Ramaphosa’s soft underbelly — his close ties with established white business — became clear in an article written in October by lawyer Paul Ngobeni, believed to be one of the brains behind her campaign.
“Untethered to Stellenbosch and unencumbered by financial shenanigans requiring sealing by the judiciary, Sisulu is likely to emerge as that leader single-mindedly focused on building ... I say this because she proved herself to be very loyal in implementation of ANC resolutions, unlike those who dilly-dally around radical reforms of the ANC,” wrote Ngobeni in a glowing tribute to her.
Equally crucial is the colossal challenge requiring Sisulu’s leadership in the shocking level of incompetence prevailing within our judiciary at the highest level, the Constitutional Court
— Paul Ngobeni
That part of her campaign’s strategy will be to win over those ANC constituencies still sympathetic to Zuma was apparent in the article.
“Equally crucial,” wrote Ngobeni, “is the colossal challenge requiring Sisulu’s leadership in the shocking level of incompetence prevailing within our judiciary at the highest level, the Constitutional Court.”
He went on to slam the highest court for jailing Zuma “without the benefit of a fair trial and in complete disregard of international law”.
If there were any doubts that Ngobeni was speaking on behalf of the minister without using her name to take pot shots at the judiciary, even if partly in defence of his close associate Western Cape judge president John Hlophe, those doubts would have been extinguished this week.
A day before the ANC celebrated its 110th birthday, Sisulu published an op-ed that defined the constitution as “neoliberal with foreign inspiration” and wonders aloud: “What has this beautiful constitution done for the victims [of colonialism and apartheid] except as a palliative?
“What we have instead witnessed under a supreme constitution and the rule of law since 1994 has been the co-option and invitation of political power brokers to the dinner table, whose job is to keep the masses quiet in their sufferance while they dine on caviar with colonised capital ... Otherwise, what explains the sudden astronomical wealth of so-called ‘liberators’ over such a short period of time? How did some become multimillionaires and billionaires overnight while a third of their fellow citizens languish on social grants?”
It is hard not to read the last two sentences as a dig at the ANC’s billionaire president.
Will her stance on the judiciary and the constitution, and her newly found opposition to the post-1994 billionaires, be enough to convince Zuma sympathisers within the ANC that she is the candidate they have been looking for since they lost the Nasrec conference to Ramaphosa in 2017?
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