The ANC Women's League lost a great deal of credibility when, in October 2012, its Mpumalanga provincial secretary, Clara Ndlovu, embarrassingly declared: "We want to have a female president in the near future. We are just not prepared for it now. We do not have capable leaders."
The league's president, Angie Motshekga, was rather more diplomatic when she said last year that, if the league campaigned for a woman president, it would be "fighting a losing battle". But we got the point.
A lot can happen in a year, though, and when President Jacob Zuma said in June that the country was, in fact, ready to be led by a woman, it must have given the traditionalists in the Women's League quite a shock.
Reports after the general election suggesting that Zuma, 74, was not in the best of health sparked a flurry of speculation that he might not serve a full second term and his comments a month later did nothing to counter the conjecture.
But party insiders suggest there was more to it: some of Zuma's supporters favour appointing Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, his former wife, who chairs the African Union Commission, or ANC chairman Baleka Mbete, to succeed him as party leader and as president in 2019. They favour the two women ahead of the party's deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
Elevating Dlamini-Zuma or Mbete would run counter to ANC tradition but politically it might make sense.
Ramaphosa does not command anywhere near as much support in the ANC as Zuma, which is probably why the party decided to stick with its flawed president in the general election. And it might be argued that Ramaphosa's performance at the Marikana Commission of Inquiry did him no favours.
Dlamini-Zuma, an experienced diplomat and politician, becoming president might be just what this country needs.
Her tenure at the Department of Home Affairs, where she did much to root out corruption and jack up efficiency, was nothing short of remarkable.
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