FILE PHOTO: Former South Africa presidents, Mr Thabo Mbeki and Mr Jacob Zuma at the ANC Conference. PICTURE: City Press
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0 From an African belief system, one has to respect and abide by orders and/or wishes of the departed souls, writes MOLIFI TSHABALALA
In its pursuit of an 84-year-long liberation struggle, the African National Congress (ANC) had a cohort of visionary leaders. One such leader is Oliver Tambo, whom it had sent into exile to set up an external mission in order to canvass for international solidarity against an apartheid system.
In April 1969, addressing the ANC’s first national consultative conference in Morogoro, Tanzania, he warned his fellow freedom fighters that it would be far more arduous to hold onto state power than wage the liberation struggle. Indeed, the party has experienced a significant electoral decline since 2009, thereby resulting in its loss of a few municipalities, including five metros (three in Gauteng and one apiece in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal), and a growing sense of disenchantment with its current, self-serving crop of leaders, his warning increasingly appears an inevitable reality by a day.
In fact, polls and the punditocracy at large predict that the ANC would decline to below 50% in 2024, ascribing its further electoral decline to poor service delivery, rampant corruption and load shedding, which has reached a nadir with frequent stage 6, in the main. It might not be in the forthcoming elections, but the ANC’s days in power are numbered. Contrary to its former president, Jacob Zuma, it would not govern South Africa for eternity.
In his book, The Things That Could Not Be Said, Tambo’s fellow freedom fighter Frank Chikane wrote: “Those who passed away during the glorious days of our new democracy went to rest in peace – pleased that what they had sacrificed for was achieved and that their sacrifices were not in vain.” In contrast, he further wrote, “most of the veterans of the struggle who pass away now go with sore hearts as their sacrifices for the new South Africa seem to have been in vain.”
Ahmed Kathrada comes to mind in this regard. In March 2016, he wrote a scathing open letter to Zuma, calling on him to resign as a South African president following a damning ruling by the Constitutional Court to the effect that he had failed to uphold his oath of office. The matter related to a whopping R246 million security upgrade at Zuma’s private residence in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal.
In her report intriguingly entitled ‘Secure in Comfort,’ former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela found that Zuma and his family had ‘unduly benefited’ from non-security upgrades, including a swimming pool (otherwise known as a ‘fire pool’) and ordered him to repay a portion of their expenditure. However, the former president had disregarded her binding remedial order.
Kathrada, whose clarion call Zuma had also disregarded, died a year later. His remaining fellow freedom fighters, most notably Thabo Mbeki, who had followed Tambo in exile on a study mission, must be living with even more sore hearts, as states of affairs within the ANC and the country have further deteriorated to the point of no return in the near future.
In 1989, while recuperating from a stroke in London, Britain, ‘OR,’ as Tambo is fondly called by his name’s initials (with Reginald as his middle name), assigned Mbeki another mission. “[L]ook after the ANC and make sure [that] we succeed,” his protégé reveals in Oliver Tambo Remembered, a book that immortalised Tambo.
From an African belief system, one has to respect and abide by orders and/or wishes of the departed souls. This is an insurmountable burden that Mbeki, who served as OR’s political secretary, carries.
It is thus no wonder that he has written a scathing letter to Paul Mashatile, an ANC deputy president. The thrust of his 17-page letter, which should be understood within the context of certain intra-party factional activities and dynamics, is a Phala Phala matter, a potentially vote-minimising scandal that involves the party president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
On 9 February 2020, a robbery occurred at Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala farmhouse in Bela Bela, Limpopo, and millions of rands (in the US dollar) stashed in a couch went missing. The money was not declared with both the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and the South African Revenue Service (SARS), not to mention being entered into a banking system.
The speaker of the National Assembly, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, had set up a three-member Section 89 Expert Panel, chaired by the Retired Chief Justice Sandile Ngcobo, to ascertain whether prima facie evidence of an impeachable case against the president exists or not. “What if the panel finds that the president has an impeachable case to answer?,” a visibly concerned Mbeki posing a vexing question at an annual general meeting of the Strategic Dialogue Group (SDG), a lobbyist organisation that comprises former student activists.
“Even if the panel is not correct,” he continued, “the leadership of the ANC cannot avoid meeting to discuss the question of the Phala Phala matter.” The party’s national executive committee (NEC), the highest decision-making body between conferences, did convene an urgent meeting to discuss the matter.
However, somewhere in the region of 20 members, including Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who is herself a reputable freedom fighter, had been denied an opportunity to express themselves on the matter. Even Mbeki had been denied such an opportunity, revealed Tony Yengeni, a former NEC member, speaking to the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).
Usually, a meeting of such vital importance in which the president’s future is the main, if not the only, agenda item, carries on until every member has spoken and then the NEC reaches a general consensus. For example, the meetings in which the past NECs resolved to recall Mbeki and Zuma as their deployees in government had carried on until the early hours of the following days.
The NEC instructed its Members of Parliament (MPs) to vote against a motion to set up impeachment proceedings against Ramaphosa. Mbeki would not have supported this decision if his letter is anything to go by.
“The way we voted on 13 December 2022,” he wrote, “communicated the unequivocal statement to the masses of the people that we do not want Parliament to seek and gain a deeper and comprehensive understanding of the Phala Phala matter.” Arguing that they had been denied the opportunity to speak on the matter, Dlamini-Zuma and Supra Mahumapelo, among others, defied the party line.
Ramaphosa had volunteered himself to appear before the party’s integrity commission (IC) to account for the Phala Phala scandal. However, the IC’s report in this regard has been kept under wraps to this day.
• Molifi Tshabalala is an author with an interest in intra-party factionalism
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