JUSTICE MALALA

There will be much jubilation and celebration in many quarters across the country this week as deputy president David “DD” Mabuza packs up his lightly used office in Pretoria and opens a new chapter in his life. In the next few weeks President Cyril Ramaphosa will announce a new cabinet. Mabuza says he has already resigned, and Paul Mashatile, the party’s deputy president, is most likely to replace him.

Many will remember Mabuza’s many trips to Russia (for treatment for a still unknown medical condition) and say that it is good he will no longer be impoverishing the state. Many will reflect on the numerous stories of corruption that emanated from Mpumalanga during his tenure as an MEC and as premier of that province. Others will be reminded that even as recently as December last year the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) laid a criminal complaint with the Investigating Directorate of the National Prosecuting Authority, which named him as the lead suspect in an alleged multi-million-rand land claims scam.

Mabuza should be investigated, and if there is evidence of wrongdoing by him, charges should be brought against him. Let the courts decide and let the axe fall where it should. None of us, not even the man nicknamed “The Cat” (because of his survival skills), should be above the law.

The NDZ grouping, as it was then, boasted that Mabuza and his delegates from Mpumalanga would support their candidacy.

But as Mabuza departs the national stage, it is for a different reason that I will remember him. It is his actions at the ANC’s 2017 national conference that have been the most enigmatic and consequential.

Many readers will remember that, in the run-up to that conference, outgoing ANC president Jacob Zuma had picked his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to continue his legacy in the ANC. The NDZ grouping, as it was then, boasted that Mabuza and his delegates from Mpumalanga would support their candidacy. In the months before that conference, Mabuza had met with the ANC’s leaders in North West and Gauteng (the so-called “premier league” faction) and they seemed to be at one in their support of Dlamini-Zuma.

In the run-up to the 2017 conference, Dlamini-Zuma seemed to be the front-runner. Her supporters were cock-a-hoop, declaring that victory was in the bag. Their insurance, they said, was that Mabuza was their preferred candidate for the deputy presidency and appeared on their list, meaning he would reciprocate by throwing his province’s weight behind them.

Then something funny happened at the conference itself. When Mabuza gathered with the 708 or so delegates from Mpumalanga to finalise who they would vote for, he refused to endorse Dlamini-Zuma and instead told the delegates to “vote with their conscience”. And so it was that, instead of voting for Dlamini-Zuma as expected, some of the Mpumalanga delegates voted for Ramaphosa, giving him a very slim win to become president of the party.

One of the highlights of that conference came when the results were announced. Instead of focusing on the person announcing the results, eNCA reporter Nickolaus Bauer trained his camera on the face of Jacob Zuma. As it became clear that Dlamini-Zuma had lost, one could see the shock, anger, confusion, disappointment and myriad other emotions flash across Zuma’s face. He knew it was over. So did we.

What was over was the reign of the Gupta family as leaders of South Africa. Through their hold on Zuma and his family (their television channel, ANN7, even gave Dlamini-Zuma an award as South African of the year in 2015!), they were in charge of appointing cabinet ministers, awarding and receiving state tenders, and all sorts of other mayhem.

Now, there is much that is wrong with South Africa and the ANC in the past five years. South Africans know this because they are the ones sitting in the dark, without water and navigating collapsing infrastructure. They watch as their president prevaricates and stalls while thieves run amok. They wonder when he will wake up and realise the country is on fire.

With all that said, I want to thank Mabuza for that one inspired moment in December 2017 when he refused to continue endorsing the grip of the Gupta and Zuma families on South Africa. A Dlamini-Zuma presidency would have been a continuation of the Zuma presidency, which was a Gupta presidency. It would have been an absolute disaster.

We still don’t know why Mabuza did what he did. It was likely for selfish reasons. That does not matter now — he helped us dodge a bullet at a time when we were at the very end of our tether. For that, I am grateful to him. He did one good thing.

So, goodbye David Mabuza. We won’t miss you much, but I for one will always remember the plane crash you helped us avert.