Howard Barrell
Only interventions by senior African National Congress members persuaded Thabo Mbeki to appoint the ANC’s Western Cape leader, Ebrahim Rasool, as the party’s candidate for premier in the province.
Mbeki, who is president of the ANC, and the party’s deployment committee had favoured parachuting in an alternative to Rasool, according to ANC sources. Their reasoning was it was necessary to have a coloured Christian as the ANC’s premier candidate if the party was to win over sufficient coloured voters to take the province from the New National Party. Rasool is a devout Muslim.
The ANC national leadership canvassed several possibilities, including former mayor of Cape Town Teresa Solomons, the party’s chief whip in the National Assembly, Tony Yengeni, and Minister of Welfare and Population Development Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, before settling on John Erntszen, the deputy chair of the Public Service Commission, these sources add.
Erntszen is a former general secretary of the South African Municipal Workers’ Union.
But senior ANC members in the province who have Mbeki’s ear argued strongly against Erntszen’s candidacy, according to these ANC sources. Mbeki was told that Erntszen lacked Rasool’s background and authority in the party and that many party members might object strongly, particularly in view of what they saw as the effective campaign against the NNP that Rasool is leading in the province. Although Rasool is not a Christian, he is a widely respected member of the religious community in the Western Cape.
Only this last-minute intervention gave Rasool the candidacy, and he did not have time to get to Johannesburg for the formal announcement of the ANC’s premier candidates on April 22, the sources added. The other eight premier candidates were introduced to the media by ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe.
ANC national representative Thabo Masebe said on Thursday that, in the consultation process, Mbeki would have had ”several names mentioned to him”. But, said Masebe, he was not privy to what had gone through Mbeki’s mind in the course of appointing the candidates.
”All the premier candidates, including Rasool, were told they had been selected only on the day before the announcement was made. It may be that there were then logistical difficulties for Rasool in getting up to Johannesburg,” Masebe said.
Attempts to get official comment from the Western Cape ANC were unsuccessful.