EDITORIAL: Is the Ace in Cyril’s pack really a joker?
Magashule and Mabuza threaten to be as dangerous for Ramaphosa as Jacob Zuma was for Thabo Mbeki
"Ace Magashule is a definite no no no, the man will finish what is remaining of our movement. He will kill it." These were the prophetic words of Fikile Mbalula, now the ANC’s head of elections, ahead of the party’s 2017 elective conference at Nasrec. Now, it’s not every day that you put "Mbalula" and "prophetic" in the same sentence, but there it is. Even more unlikely: Mbalula is right. Yet, at the same time that Cyril Ramaphosa was elected president of the ANC and ushered in a "new dawn", Magashule was voted in as secretary-general. It said much about internal ANC battles that the party, while talking tough about "cleaning up", elected the man who destroyed the Free State during his nine years as premier to a post seen as the party’s CEO, responsible for communicating its message to the electorate. The Nasrec conference also chose David Mabuza as deputy president — a man who, as The New York Times wrote last year, was implicated in siphoning money from schools and other public se...
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