MK party president, Jacob Zuma. (Busi Lethole)
Competing parallel structures and a breakdown in relations between legislature leaders and national and provincial structures have emerged as a major threat to Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party in its KwaZulu-Natal stronghold.
The party took 14% of the vote nationally, much of it through its demolition of the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal, where it emerged as the largest single party with 45% of the vote and 37 seats in the legislature after 29 May.
It failed to take control of the province after being outmanoeuvred during the post-election negotiations, and has not managed to consolidate on its initial victory at the polls in subsequent by-elections in KwaZulu-Natal.
The party also underdelivered at its first anniversary rally in Durban in December, at which party leader Jacob Zuma addressed a partially empty stadium — in part because of delays in the programme.
A battle for control over the funding the party receives from the state through its legislature representation has also broken out.
Last Friday, MK party secretary general Floyd Shivambu appointed KwaZulu-Natal member of the provincial legislature (MPL) Mervyn Dirks as its chief whip after the suspension of Kwazi Mbanjwa, a former provincial convener, from the party.
Mbanjwa was suspended along with MPLs Thobani Zuma and Sifiso Zuma on New Year’s Eve, after being recalled from the legislature in late December for refusing to hand over control of legislature funds to the provincial leadership team headed by convener Willies Mchunu.
At the same time a “stand-off” has developed between the leadership of the MK party in the Moses Mabhida region in the Midlands, which backs the three suspended leaders, who come from Pietermaritzburg and nearby towns.
Some members from Moses Mabhida demonstrated outside Jacob Zuma’s home at Nxamalala at the weekend. They are understood to have sought an audience with Zuma to protest against the suspensions and to accuse Mchunu and his team, appointed last October, of running parallel structures in the province.
After the meeting, a voice recording emerged of Zuma admonishing MK members for fighting over positions and for even threatening each other with firearms.
In it, Zuma said “people are pointing guns at each other” and that he was “worried” about the infighting.
“We are fighting each other in the women’s structures, in the youth, everywhere,” Zuma said. “I won’t allow that.”
The group later attempted — in vain — to force a meeting with Mchunu, to “seek his wisdom”. It is understood that they threatened to stage a sit-in at a Durban beachfront hotel where Mchunu had earlier been holding meetings.
Mchunu is a former KwaZulu-Natal premier and ANC provincial leader who has had a close personal and political association with Zuma dating back to the 1970s, and who was one of the key figures in securing Zuma’s bid for the ANC presidency in 2007.
A former trade unionist who was involved in the ANC underground and in the peace talks with the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) to end the political violence in the province in the 1990s, Mchunu resigned from the ANC last October.
The move — and Mchunu’s subsequent appointment as MK party convener in the province — was not a surprise.
He replaced Mbanjwa, a former director general of transport in the province, who had moved to the legislature to head the party contingent, as the KwaZulu-Natal MK party convener.
The transition has not been smooth.
Parallel structures
In an exclusive interview this week, Mchunu told the Mail & Guardian that his team had found parallel structures around the province, which had led to the estrangement with the party’s Moses Mabhida regional leadership.
“When we were appointed on 28 October 2024, we were told of the existence of parallel structures, which was confirmed in the hand-over reports of the outgoing interim provincial committee,” Mchunu said.
“We then called all of these people who were in the parallel structures to get an understanding of where this is coming from. In many instances it came about because new leadership was appointed without revoking the appointment of the old leaderships.”
“Because people have not been told that they were no longer leaders, they just continued to lead. That is the historical development of parallel structures, but we are now being accused of setting them up, a clear distortion of the truth,” he said.
He said the problem of parallel structures was “broader” than Moses Mabhida — “it’s not like there are no noises from other regions as well”.
“There was an interim convener and coordinator who were appointed. When they went to the regions, they appointed conveners and coordinators,” Mchunu said. “They were then removed. When the new convener and coordinator came into the picture, they also went ahead and appointed their own conveners and coordinators without revoking the appointments that were done before.
“That is the history that has led to people claiming that they are still leaders because they have never been removed. You may not agree with them, but technically they have not been formally removed,” he said.
The effect of these competing groupings in the party cost it the by-election in the uMsunduzi local municipality’s ward 2 on 18 December last year.
The candidate elected by the local structure, Nkosinathi Mshengu, was replaced with Sthabiso Nkabinde, who was favoured by the regional leadership to stand as councillor.
Mchunu said the party had done so with the collusion of Mbanjwa, who was the MK party’s designated contact person with the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), and who had changed the candidate 30 minutes before close of day for nominations.
The provincial leadership took the matter to the high court ahead of the by-election, but lost on a “technicality” in that Mbanjwa, who was still the designated IEC contact person for the party, had the right to register the candidate.
A number of MK party supporters wrote Mshengu’s name on their ballot papers, spoiling their votes. As a result, the MK party vote in the ward was split and the ANC beat it by 1 602 to 1 164.
Mchunu said “we are no longer on good terms as the provincial leadership and the regional leadership” and changing the candidate had cost the MK party the ward.
Since then, things have soured further and Mchunu has come under attack on social media.
“When tensions arose between us and the regional leadership, they started going on social media attacks against myself and the leadership of the province and the leaders of the national high command,” he said.
“Even this candidate who lost, a very young boy, has now begun to attack us. This is very funny when you are attacked by a very young boy who says you were a failure in the ANC,” he said. “You look at this young boy and say, ‘Does his head function properly? Where was he?’ If he says I was a failure in the ANC, how did I become a leader in the province for so long, in the legislature, in government?”
Mchunu said there appeared to be a “stand-off” with the provincial leadership, the Moses Mabhida region and some of its sub-regions.
“The genesis in my view — unless there is something else — is that this fallout arises out of the ward 2 candidate nomination process and the replacing of the popular candidate. If there are other reasons, I will be prepared to listen to those,” he said.
Mchunu said although they had recommended disciplinary action against the region and Mbanjwa over the ward 2 candidate issue, they had not moved the process that had resulted in Mbanjwa and the two Zumas being suspended by the national structure.
In terms of the MK party constitution, discipline and finance are national and not provincial or regional competencies, and it was the high command that had initiated action against them over their “perceived defiance” of the instruction to hand over control of the party’s provincial legislature accounts.
The funds — understood to amount to about R60 million — were meant for constituency offices and party work outside the legislature, and needed to be administered through cooperation between the party inside and outside the house.
Mchunu said Mbanjwa had defied high command resolutions with regard to how the money would be administered.
“Those of us who have served in both the legislature and organisational structure understand this very well, but it didn’t seem that those who are in the legislature understood this and they were resisting this coordination and cooperation with the organisation outside,” he said.
“That is what I understand to have pitted the legislature leadership of the MK party in our province against the national leadership.”
Mchunu said the claims by his detractors in the party that he had demanded R22 million from Mbanjwa was “very out of order” and that he had not done so.
“We [the province] are nowhere in this matter. It’s a matter between the office of the treasurer general and those who were controlling the legislature funds over the perceived defiance of the instructions of the national high command.”
Mchunu said the internal tensions and parallel structures were a “worrying factor”, particularly going into a local government election next year in which the party will need to consolidate the gains it made last May.
New leadership ‘soon’
Mchunu said a new leadership would be appointed “very soon” as part of a programme of dissolving all parallel structures and starting afresh the process of building branches.
“When we appoint the new leadership, we are going to correct things that we think went wrong. We are going to revoke every authorisation for appointment to be convener and coordinator. That should give us space. As we appoint new people, we will have to revoke the old appointments, all of them, and then initiate a new programme of unifying the party. Hopefully this will work.”
But there would be pushback from various quarters. “Some of these noises are not going to die down. There will be people who are not going to be happy for whatever reason and they will make noise.
“There will also be people who are working for the opposition. People will deny it, but if we were able to do it, during our time, to get people within our adversaries to work towards a different agenda, why would we as the MK party think that we are immune? We are not.
“There will be people who will want to destabilise the party and eat it from within. Hopefully we will be able to respond to these situations,” Mchunu said.
‘Not involved’
Mbanjwa told the M&G that he was “never involved at all” in the Moses Mabhida by-election process, in which the regional convener “did everything”.
He said that when the IEC had contacted him about the issue of the candidate, he had simply referred them to the regional convener, Cebisile Zuma.
“What I said to the IEC is that the convener is in charge of the process and all was sorted out with her. I did not even know the candidate.”
Mbanjwa said he had handed over control of the legislature funds to Mchunu as instructed by the party leadership.
“We were told by Willies to withdraw as signatories to the MKP account, which we did. I then informed the legislature that we are no longer signatories to the account. I had to inform them that I am no longer responsible for that account and that Willies was,” Mbanjwa said.
“So Willies knows how much was handed over to them and how they spent that money because Thobani Zuma and myself were no longer in the picture of what was happening in the account.”
On Wednesday, MK party spokesperson Nhlamulo Ndhlela said in a statement that Nkabinde, Cebisile Zuma and Mbanjwa had been served with letters of suspension over the ward 2 by-election debacle.
The party would institute disciplinary proceedings against them as it is “not an organisation of anarchy and lawlessness”.