Perhaps indicative of the task ahead of him should he be elected, colleagues from the ANC’s human resources office have decided to doorstep party spokesperson Pule Mabe so they can have a word with him as soon as the interview is done.
He says he knows the urgency. Some ANC head office employees have taken the liberty to moonlight elsewhere, pointing out that they need the money because they have not been paid.
“That excuse is over now. They have been paid. They must come back to work,” Mabe says.
Though Mabe has himself been accused of mistreating unpaid workers, he says it is this reality of colleagues facing uncertainty about being paid consistently and on agreed dates that has made him raise his hand to become the next party treasurer-general when the organisation meets at Nasrec in a week-and-a-half.
In typical ANC language and tradition, he is also doing all this because the branches, particularly his own, have seen him to be fit for the job and asked him to avail himself.
As for the job he is campaigning for itself, he is upfront about not having a big manifesto.
“If I said to you that my agreement to stand as treasurer-general was informed by me wanting to bring in big and new ideas to change how the ANC raises its funds, I would be lying to you and your readers. There is a lot that the current treasurer-general and those who came before him have done.
“What is required is to accelerate those and ensure that the most practical ones under the conditions of the Political Party Funding Act are made to work. More importantly, push your members. The membership must be the primary source of funding.”
Mabe accepts the size of the challenge and believes that facing it head-on will make him a better comrade.
“It is not that one has a silver bullet type of solution but to go into a challenging space can only help you to develop into a better comrade. The treasury space means that you are at the centre of finding solutions not just for society as a whole but for members of the ANC who rely on the ANC for their subsistence and survival.”
Mabe, who is head of information and publicity, sees his current job and his next as interlinked, should the conference elect him ahead of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s adviser and fund raiser, Benjani Chauke, who leads the nomination list and Ekurhuleni regional chairperson Mzwandile Masina.
Both jobs are about and depend on how the ANC is perceived by funders and the electorate. The ANC, he says, needs to be trusted by those who see SA as an investment destination and even by tourists thinking of a holiday.
“When you are a governing party you are a custodian of trust and confidence. You are responsible for boosting investor confidence. Positioning the ANC as a trusted brand is not only going to come about by making big rhetorical statements.”
Mabe says that he has been at Luthuli House for about 15 years, first as treasurer-general of the youth league and now in his present capacity. This means that he has greater empathy and understanding of how a broke ANC has an impact on its staff and by extension, its ability to implement its ideas and programmes.
Mabe or any other person who becomes the party’s chief fundraiser has a big task ahead of them.
In August, the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) compelled the ANC to settle the estimated R85m in outstanding and accumulated debt it owed its workers through a provident fund scheme.
The FSCA signed an enforceable undertaking with the ANC staff provident fund, requiring the party to pay R10m into the fund each month until its accumulated contribution arrears were paid in full.
Mabe says the party has since turned the corner. Its finances are healthier but that does not mean the challenges are over.
Mabe says the ANC has three sources of funding. These are subscriptions and membership fees from members, subscriptions through debit orders paid by its elected public representatives and the allocation of money given to political parties proportional to the number of seats they occupy in parliament.
The electoral decline hurts the ANC's pocket because it means the party’s allocation has decreased substantially.
With the Political Party Funding Act limiting what donors can give to organisations without needing to be publicly known, the ANC has had to play in the equities space to try and raise cash, says Mabe.
“If you do not manage your reputation as a political party you will struggle to mobilise funds. The mobilisation of funds is a function of trust. Trust is boosted by credibility. You just have to be credible and believable. The ANC needs to be a believable brand.
“We can’t say we still claim the trust of our people as we did in the past. There has been a trust deficit. If you look at how much the people trusted the ANC in 1994 and in 2022, you can see that there has been a serious trust deficit.
“This reputational management work should not be limited to the usual issues of maleficence and corruption by individual members.
“You also earn trust by how you manage resources, public infrastructure, the delivery of basic services. It also depends on the people you put forward to do that work. When you bring in a good pair of hands to do the work, that is also important,” says Mabe.
*This interview took place before retired chief justice Sandile Ngcobo’s report was released.
PODCAST | One on one with ANC treasurer-general contender Pule Mabe
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