A debate on the internal and external damage inflicted on the African National Congress by Jacob Zuma’s rape trial will top the agenda of the party’s national executive committee (NEC) meeting in a fortnight’s time.
Four senior ANC leaders, three of them members of the NEC, confirmed that the NEC had decided last weekend to scrutinise the trial fallout, which has heightened divisions over the presidential succession.
There has been a mounting call from tripartite alliance leaders, and analysts, for the ANC to begin managing the leadership crisis in its ranks, ahead of its national conference next year.
Last weekend’s NEC meeting was convened to consider Zuma’s letter to Kgalema Motlanthe, ANC secretary general, signalling his readiness to resume his party leadership positions following his rape acquittal.
The NEC accepted Zuma’s request, but went to some length to contain the trouble caused by trial revelations that Zuma had had sex with an HIV-positive woman, and persistent suggestions that the trial was part of a state-sponsored campaign, driven by Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils and former national director of public prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka, to scotch Zuma’s presidential ambitions.
”The ANC finds that there is no basis to suggestions that any member of the ANC encouraged the complainant in the rape case to lay a charge against the ANC deputy president. Allegations against [Kasrils] and [Ngcuka] in this regard are without substance,” the NEC said after the meeting.
The planned debate at the next NEC encounter is understood to be the beginning of a drive to contain factional infighting in the ANC.
”This experience [Zuma’s rape trial] places a particular responsibility on the leadership and the membership of the democratic movement, and on society more broadly, to work to reinforce in practice the founding principles and values of our democratic society,” said the NEC statement.
Political heat in the ruling alliance reached new levels this week with the release of a 42-page South African Communist Party discussion document, which openly criticises President Thabo Mbeki’s leadership style and its effect on the alliance.
The document suggests that the core values of the ANC have been usurped by ”a technocratically orientated presidential centre, organically remote from a popular power base,” and that there is an urgent need to ”rebuild … an ANC that is capable of leading popular struggles on the ground, an ANC in which organisation and popular politics are reconnected”.
Zuma, seen as a people’s president, is seen by many ANC supporters as the leader who can reclaim the party from the Mbeki camp.
While the SACP has publicly insisted that it will support the ANC’s presidential choice, the document says it is considering contesting elections in its own right.
The party said it was extremely concerned about ”the crises of corruption, factionalism and personal careerism inherent in trying to build a leading cadre based on … capitalist values and on a symbiosis between the leading echelons of the state and emerging black capital”.
The document is likely to up the ante in the succession battle. Mbeki has come under increasing fire, and has been increasingly disabled, by criticism of his ”powerful presidential centre” and ”attempted modernisation of the ANC [that] has involved a deliberate strategy to marginalise the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions … to provoke a walkout from the alliance”.