PEDRO MZILENI | End of the road as ANC branches hang Mabuza out to dry

Since the ANC opened branch nominations about a month ago for December’s 55th national conference, the name of the current deputy president, David Mabuza, has been disappearing into thin air.

Most provinces have publicly announced their preferred candidates and many branches across the country have also been publishing their nominations on social media – none of them contains the name of Mabuza.

ANC conferences are predictable and easy to call. The party’s nominations processes are always transparent and consistent. Those who get nominated always have a higher probability of being the ones who ultimately get elected – and the past three national elective conferences have shown exactly that.

Polokwane in 2007, Mangaung in 2012, and Nasrec in 2017 – the comrades with the most branch nominations and those who were supported by the big provinces won the elections. Simple.

In essence, we could just conclude now and say this is, indeed, the end of Mabuza.

But how did Mabuza get to this point? How did he become so powerless and irrelevant in such a short space of time after being the second most powerful politician in the land?

How did someone who got 2,538 votes at the past national conference in Nasrec, the highest votes received out of all the 86 NEC members that were elected there – move from the mountain top all the way down to zero so quickly.

Three reasons. To begin with, his rise itself to be the deputy president was questionable by ANC norms and traditions. The 2017 conference credentials show that Mabuza’s home province, Mpumalanga, had the 2nd biggest allocation in the country with 736 voting delegates expected. Only KZN was bigger with 870 delegates.

But when it came to the actual population numbers of people who voted for the ANC in the 2019 general elections, Mpumalanga was in 5th position, registering below 900 000,people who voted for the party.

The provinces of the Eastern Cape, KZN, Limpopo, and Gauteng all had millions of people voting for the ANC.

This means that the ANC in Mpumalanga under Mabuza in 2017 had an unexplainable inflation of branches and membership for the sole purpose of going to the Nasrec conference to have him elected as deputy president. The ANC as an organisation did not really exist in communities of Mpumalanga.

Fast forward to 2022, Mpumalanga only has 390 delegates expected for the upcoming December conference, a 50% drop in numbers to 5th place, with absolutely no chance to be a kingmaker again.

This is clear evidence that the 2017 episode of ANC Mpumalanga politics were all a transaction for Mabuza’s sunrise. In fact, he even betrayed his own RET (radical economic transformation) faction in Nasrec by leaving it behind at the door to emerge by himself as deputy president, yet all along he was pretending to be in Zuma’s camp going to that conference.

You don’t do this in the ANC. This is one party that has zero tolerance for selling out, especially in deals of this kind.

Secondly, because Mabuza was holding the ANC in Mpumalanga hostage in 2017 as his commodity to trade with, his departure from being provincial chairperson to being deputy president was probably something he was hesitant to do. He knew that he would lose the grip of a bigger pie to control, a province, as compared to a tiny office of an assistant political head far away in the wilderness that he has to share with Ramaphosa and according to Ramaphosa’s delegation powers.

Thirdly, he never got a chance to position himself as presidential. If you check the past three deputy presidents in Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe, and Cyril Ramaphosa – they had the aura, charisma, and serious state responsibilities to showcase their skills, oratory, diplomacy, and statesmanship for the country’s national consciousness to start believing that they could head the state one day in future.

He did not have this kind of an appeal as deputy president. His appearances were brief, boring, and quite clownish – and his reputation of being a cat that operates at night through backroom deals in a country that has growing public distrust and disgust with crime and corruption – his image did not pick up to something legitimate.

In essence, he was just unfit for the moment and it is unfortunate that the upcoming December conference of the ANC will be his political obituary.