The battle for leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) would be either a two- or three-way race, businessman Saki Macozoma told students and academics at the University of the Witwatersrand on Thursday.
”That’s what I read,” he said in a lecture facilitated by the Platform on Public Deliberations as part of its series of Conversations on Leadership.
What was important was that delegates at the ANC national conference in Polokwane in December chose the best person for the job and not the best man, said Macozoma.
It was as if ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma and businessman Tokyo Sexwale were ”men in a bar contesting about some woman”, he said.
Asked whether open campaigning was good or bad, Macozoma said: ”I think there is open campaigning and open campaigning.”
It would be wrong for ANC members to wake up to the need to choose new leaders only when its national conference dawned.
”There should be nothing that stops ANC members from saying ‘I am available’,” he said.
However, he added that when people did say they were available to stand, there should be protocols in place to guide their behaviour.
This week, President Thabo Mbeki reiterated that he would be available to lead the ANC.
Businessman Cyril Ramaphosa, who has been nominated by the ANC’s Rondebosch branch, has remained silent on whether he will accept the nomination.
Macozoma pointed out that the ANC had a history of leadership contestation, despite a period of relative stability which arose from an influx of ”extraordinarily talented” people pushed into the organisation by repression.
This — and government attempts to foist leaders onto the public — led to the concept of ”tried and tested” leaders, and the notion that ANC leadership was a calling for which ”people did not contest”.
Since then, all the organisation’s leaders had indeed been tried and tested by time, the quality of their judgements, resilience, singularity of purpose, courage, and empathy with the people.
One of the biggest challenges facing the ANC at the moment was of working out how to attract a stream of talent on which it could rely for leaders now that there was competition for the best and brightest.
”The ANC must pay attention to leadership renewal,” said Macozoma.
The rate at which it was ”burning people up” was ”disgraceful”.
People were putting in so much work they did not have family lives.
”I you don’t have balance in life, there will be a point [at which] something will give and judgement will be clouded,” he said.
Macozoma said incumbency — and the in-fighting which went with it — was a major internal impediment to the party achieving its goals as well as the pursuit of personal wealth and factionalism.
Another impediment was alliance politics, he said, but emphasised that it was not in the interests of the ANC, the Congress of South African Trade Unions or South African Communist Party to part ways.
While they might differ on the modality, all agreed that the eradication of poverty was their priority, he said. – Sapa