Lubisi claimed Mokamu and some of the party members were forcing others to participate in a meeting with national leaders over the Thuma Mina campaign. (DW)
It is not an unmitigated disaster. At least the branches of the ANC have made it very clear what they think about slates and being lobbied, cajoled, and allegedly bribed, to vote along faction lines.
Other than that — and the tempered and possibly temporary joy showed by the financial markets — it is an unmitigated disaster, of course, just as you would expect from the end of Jacob Zuma’s term.
Zuma promised to reunite the ANC after he and Thabo Mbeki tore it apart in 2007. He leaves the top management of the party more divided than it has ever been.
The most decisive victory in the top six, for David Mabuza as deputy president came in at 54%. And that is for David Mabuza. The person the party collective was most clear it wanted to have in any of the top positions is David Mabuza. David. Mabuza.
With the top six divided in down the middle it is no wonder that both sides think the fix was in. It is a fair suspicion under the circumstances. Perhaps DD and Ace didn’t sell out NDZ, but it sure looks that way. And perhaps the vote for CR is a vote to save the ANC from itself, but if so the party is remarkably lukewarm about its saviour.
At least the ANC now officially recognises what any random South African could have told it a long time ago: many of its “members” are voting cattle for its elective conferences. Those mysterious large increases in voting numbers — that run contrary to general voting sentiment and which are reversed as soon as the voting is done — are not so mysterious after all.
That and other home truths came courtesy of our uncle in the politics business, Gwede Mantashe, who took personal responsibility for the sharp drop in party member discipline that came with the sharp uptick in their numbers.
But Uncle Gweezy’s self-flagellation notwithstanding, it is no coincidence that it was under his utterly immoral leadership that the party lost its way. His final speech captured the problem nicely, as Zuma blamed every imaginable external factor for his own failures, and so accidentally showed how the ANC lost it capacity for self-reflection.
Yet let us not forget that many people did see their lives improve under the past ANC administration, corruption or no, and when tears were shed for Zuma, not all of them were in anger. — The M&G Team