Crunch time for Zuma

04 April 2012 - 02:05 By S'Thembiso Msomi
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It was on his return from the first ever meeting of the ANC's officials - commonly known as the "top six" - when President Jacob Zuma apparently told some of his aides that he had been struck by how little his new team knew about each other.

This was in early January 2008, barely three weeks after the ruling party's Polokwane conference.

Those who were close to Zuma at the time say what struck him the most about his new team was that they had never met as a group before being elected to discuss what they saw as the future for the ANC.

As a result, each came with his or her own vision of what the post-Polokwane ANC would look like.

Many of them had made it into the top six as a result of fierce lobbying and horse-trading among the disparate groupings that came together ahead of Polokwane in order to unseat the then ANC president Thabo Mbeki.

Zuma, who had been Mbeki's ANC deputy for 10 years, was the rallying point of this campaign - with all the groupings in agreement that he was the only leader best positioned to stand against Mbeki and win.

Kgalema Motlanthe, elected as Zuma's deputy at the Polokwane conference, was the only other official who had served with Zuma in the previous top six.

The rest were new and had been voted in as part of the election slate agreed to by the broad anti-Mbeki coalition.

During the horse-trading that preceded the conference, the "Left" - made up of Cosatu and the SA Communist Party - had insisted on veteran trade unionist Gwede Mantashe as ANC secretary-general.

Cosatu and the SACP played crucial roles in Zuma's campaign and their preferred candidate had to be accommodated.

So did the ANC Youth League under its then president Fikile Mbalula. Although the league did not demand that any of its members serve in the top six, they did lobby for Mathews Phosa to be elected as the party's treasurer-general.

Zuma's supporters in KwaZulu-Natal initially wanted Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who was at Foreign Affairs at the time, to become national chairman.

But Dlamini-Zuma turned them down in favour of an Mbeki slate in which she appeared as a candidate for the deputy presidency.

As a result, Zuma supporters opted for the then national assembly speaker Baleka Mbete - who had initially been a candidate for the deputy secretary-general's post.

With Mbete running for the national chairmanship, the youth league and the MK Military Veterans' Association - which was also vocal in its support for Zuma - pushed hard for Thandi Modise, who is now North West premier, to become Mantashe's deputy.

In all honesty, there was very little that ideologically united this top six, with the likes of Phosa being seen as too pro-business, while Mantashe was viewed by some of his comrades as too much of a Cosatu/SACP man.

As a result, throughout much of its five-year term in office, the top six has demonstrated little sense of common purpose.

In recent months, with the Mangaung conference approaching, as well as divisions about how to handle the ANC's problem child, Julius Malema, deepening, the levels of trust among the top six officials have been at their lowest.

Almost all of the top six members deny in public that they are divided, but the evidence is to the contrary.

Much of the internal crisis the ruling party finds itself embroiled in today is a result of this collective failing to give coherent and effective leadership to the ANC.

All of this should be food for thought for ANC members as they prepare for Mangaung and a number of provincial conferences scheduled to be held this year.

Election slates do not work in the long run. They may be useful for putting together a winning coalition ahead of the elections, but they eventually lead to an ineffective leadership collective that is beholden to competing factions.

Moreover, election slates tend to lead to the most talented and able leaders being left in the cold if they happen not to be in the good books of the dominant factions.

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