What is it with some ANC leaders and the truth? They don’t like it. You can tell this is the case because they don’t like to go anywhere with it. They’ll threaten to reveal truths hidden to us, the poor electorate, but they never get around to doing it.
For decades relatives of ANC members who disappeared or died in its training camps in Angola and elsewhere in the 1980s have been asking for the truth about what happened to their children. These people do not hate the ANC. They love it. They just want to know what happened to their loved ones.
ANC leader Kebby Maphatsoe knows what happened to some of them. Maphatsoe told Eyewitness News in 2019: “One of my friends, my comrade, was killed for nothing; beaten to death by our own comrades in the camps.”
Has he told the family? No. Instead, he has used the knowledge he has for political gain. He has threatened to reveal his comrades’ killers if his opponents in the party do not stop criticising him.
Another ANC leader who claims to have dossier upon dossier of information is Jacob Zuma, the former state president. Last July, after an appearance at the Zondo commission (a good place to spill the beans on any matter) Zuma threatened to reveal more ANC “secrets” if his detractors don’t back off.
He warned his detractors that he would reveal information about “spies” in the ruling party. He had already claimed that his former cabinet ministers Siphiwe Nyanda and Ngoako Ramatlhodi were double agents in the apartheid era. He offered no evidence to support this claim. I hope those two are suing his pants off.
In August Magashule claimed that he was bugged and was being followed. He did not reveal who was taking on these unlawful acts or how he knows all this.
To date we have seen no evidence of these “truths” that Zuma is holding so closely to his chest. The truth is that it’s all lies and empty threats.
Now the rumour mill has it that Ace Magashule, the embattled party secretary-general, has explosive information about the funders of the Cyril Ramaphosa campaign for the 2017 party conference. Ramaphosa won the party presidency after a close contest against Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Dlamini-Zuma is now a minister in Ramaphosa’s cabinet. She ran on a slate that included Magashule as her secretary-general pick.
Do not be fooled. Both factions were heavily funded. We have a clue to who ponied up money for the Ramaphosa faction because news of these monies leaked out. Among his benefactors are bankers, wealthy South Africans and others who apparently wanted Zuma out.
We do not know who funded the Dlamini-Zuma campaign, but we can guess. Among these would be the Gupta family, who as we know were already benefactors of Ace Magashule’s sons (they lived on the Gupta premises), and some of Zuma’s sons, daughters and at least one wife.
The rumours in the ANC are that Magashule will reveal the names of Ramaphosa’s benefactors if the law enforcement authorities move against him on the Estina dairy farm and asbestos case corruption. Magashule himself has made no such threats, but he has in the past threatened to reveal information he has. We are still waiting.
In August Magashule claimed that he was bugged and was being followed. He did not reveal who was taking on these unlawful acts or how he knows all this.
“We know them, but I don’t want to accuse people of wrongdoing while it hasn’t been proven. Competent authorities and the courts must act first,” he said.
Well, well, well. Shouldn’t he lay criminal charges? Or is it, once again, a case of making things up?
Did Ramaphosa break the law when he raised funds to fight an internal ANC campaign? If that is the case then Magashule must turn his evidence over to the Hawks and let the law run its course. That is what every upstanding citizen of the country would do.
If, however, Magashule sits with this information about law-breaking (if such it is), only to use it for his own political leverage and gain, then it confirms absolutely everything that has been said about him, namely that he is a corrupt thug who has thrived in the chaos he created in the Free State during his premiership of that province. And that he has no respect for truth or the rule of law.
There are many secrets in the ANC. There are also many lies. South Africans do not care about this internal mud-slinging. They want the truth about wrongdoing – and delivery of the services they voted to get.
Magashule and Zuma, if they have any information about wrongdoing, must just turn it over to the authorities. Yet we know they will not. First, they do not have any such information. Second, they do not care about the rule of law or order. If they did they would have known that it is their civic duty to tell all – immediately.
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