JUSTICE MALALA: The coming Mashatile turmoil

Paul Mashatile, the deputy president of the ANC and of the country, is everywhere these days.

He delivered the Solomon Mahlangu lecture in Cape Town last week. Then he hotfooted it to Joburg for the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation’s business breakfast, where he said DA members should be ashamed to serve in a cabinet whose budget their party rejected.

“I’m not sure what they are thinking,” Mashatile said with a straight face. He did not elaborate on how a “party of the poor” such as the ANC was not ashamed to raise VAT in such a constrained economic environment and against all rational advice.

Mashatile has led the ANC’s discussions with smaller parties while making it clear the DA was no longer welcome in the GNU, saying that it had “defined itself” out of the coalition.

Mashatile’s busyness is easy to explain — and that explanation is important for our projections of how the GNU evolves, lives or dies. The ANC’s five-yearly national general council (NGC), which reviews progress in policy implementation, is due this year.

It is also the key forum at which whoever sees themself as the next president gets to show themself and test their chances. Factions wanting to influence policy or push their leadership choices traditionally test themselves at such gatherings.

Covid scuppered the 2020 NGC, robbing the ANC of the chance to reflect on its character in the wake of the destructive Jacob Zuma era. This will be the first NGC since the Zuma departure in February 2018. It will be the first open critique of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s “new dawn” at a nonelective conference.

Ramaphosa must expect a rough ride. His promises of party rejuvenation have largely fallen flat. His assurances that an economic miracle is afoot have proved hollow. The two years to December 2027, when the party holds its next elective conference, are unlikely to be any easier.

That means every hopeful for the throne will want to distance themselves from Ramaphosa. His long — and lonely — walk to freedom from the presidency of the ANC has started.

Meanwhile, Mashatile is a man in a hurry. He wants Ramaphosa out the door — quickly. That is why he has rushed to be the main champion of a reconfigured GNU without the DA, or one in which it is far weaker than it is right now.

Part of the reason the GNU has survived as long as it has is that key ANC leaders have supported it, despite negative outbursts from the likes of Panyaza Lesufi in Gauteng, Solly Mapaila at the SACP, and others. That has changed. Mashatile is now expressing full-throttle disillusionment with the participation of the DA in the coalition.

The view among a significant number — not the majority yet — of ANC leaders is that they should dump the DA and form a rickety coalition with the eight small opposition parties in the GNU and others that support them.

Mashatile has been the main proponent of the idea that if the DA continues to refuse to support the budget, then it does not deserve to be in the GNU. Lesufi, leader of the ANC in Gauteng, posted on X that the DA cannot be trusted: “They want to be in government and opposition at the same time.”

Mashatile’s supporters believe that the winning ticket in the ANC now is one that kicks out the DA and gets into bed with the IFP, Patriotic Alliance, UDM, Rise Mzansi, Al Jama-ah, PAC, GOOD, and perhaps ActionSA and Mmusi Maimane’s Build One South Africa. His path to the ANC presidency is supported by factions (Gauteng ANC, SACP and a rump within the ANC) that have opposed the coalition with the DA from the get-go. For this faction, even the EFF and the MK Party would be better bedfellows.

So Mashatile’s path to power may well destroy the ANC-DA+8 coalition as it stands and give us a far more fragile arrangement in which the small parties may hold inordinate power. The NGC would then be used to rubber-stamp the decision and spin it as a victory for the ANC.