The African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) will not be dragooned by members of the tripartite alliance into punting any candidate for the leadership of the ANC, league president Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said this week.
Mapisa-Nqakula, also Home Affairs Minister, was speaking at a press conference after the league’s three-day lekgotla (meeting) in Benoni last week. The ANCWL’s leadership is widely perceived to be aligned with President Thabo Mbeki in the succession battle.
However, Mapisa-Nqakula said the choice of who should replace Mbeki as ANC president at the December ANC conference would be guided by principles to be set out by the league.
She suggested ”good principles, selflessness, cadreship and years of service to the liberation movement” would be high on the list of the required qualities.
The league got its fingers badly burnt when it punted its former president, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, as its candidate for the deputy presidency ahead of the 1997 conference in Mafikeng.
This time, Mapisa-Nqakula said the league would not be pushed by the media or the ANC’s allies — an oblique reference to the ANC Youth League, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party, seen as punting Jacob Zuma — to show its hand.
”There will be guiding principles about the quality of the leader that we want before we get to picking someone’s name,” she said. The league had no preference for a woman as the next leader, as suggested by Mbeki, she added, and ”all ANC members have a right to make themselves available for the leadership positions”.
”The leadership issue the media is reporting about is of no concern to us. We are rich with leadership, so this debate is neither here nor there.
”I can assure you that in the ANC there is no anxiety around this issue; a leader will emerge,” she said.
The ANCWL will go to the December conference with more muscle after being given the right to independently elect its candidates and the status of a province, instead of its traditional 50 delegates.
This will enhance its role as an important power broker at the conference, where a scramble for the control of the smaller provinces is expected, because influential provinces like the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal are divided.
The ANCWL sank into the doldrums after the Mafikeng conference and its nomination of Madikizela-Mandela.
The latter’s refusal to decline the nomination, despite the efforts of party elders, including Nelson Mandela, to convince her to back down, and media campaigns by Mbeki loyalists to discredit her, cost the league its right to nominate candidates.
The discontent over Madikizela-Mandela’s candidacy — again pushed by her supporters ahead of the 2002 Stellenbosch conference — tore the league apart, with Madikizela-Mandela maintaining a strong body of support.
The current ANCWL leadership, however, appears to have learned from that experience and is not expected to rock the boat this year.
Mbeki loyalists hold almost all the strategic positions in the league — even in KwaZulu-Natal, where fervent Mbeki supporter Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is chairperson.
Dlamini-Zuma is reported to be Mbeki’s preferred candidate for the ANC presidency, while Mapisa-Nqakula and her deputy, Mavivi Myakayaka-Manzini, are known Mbeki loyalists.
The league is expected to throw its weight behind provinces like the Eastern Cape and Gauteng, which are expected to back Mbeki or an Mbeki-anointed candidate at the conference.