As South Africa approaches its holiday season, there will be no holiday for the ANC. The year ends with a fiercely debated subject, the disbandment of provincial executive committees (PECs) in the two economically dominant provinces. Without the benefit of criteria used to generate the possibility of disbanding two of its strategically important provinces, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal , it is clear that South Africa is now at an either-or decision point on this matter.
The stakes will be higher when the “who succeeds Ramaphosa as ANC president” question is factored into the discussions. The ANC is now a site of succession politics and attendant contestations. Its soul will be the prize or casualty of the GP-KZN disbandment. Wrestling within its top leadership echelons is not a good sign of the stability required to complete its ambitious renewal programme.
The established convention is that the deputy president is the heir to the ANC throne. The convention is vulnerable to disruption, thus making the position of the ANC president available to anyone who can mount a campaign. This makes provinces that command numerical and hegemonic influences within the ANC sites of the “who succeeds Ramaphosa” battle. All logic in the ANC might, until December 16 2027, be filtered through its succession battles.
The cadence of the 2026 municipal election readiness of the ANC will reflect how dominant the contesting groups or factions have become. The upcoming ANC regional conferences, essentially the nodes of influence to determine municipal elections candidate lists, as well as delegates to the muted 2025 National General Council, and the finalisation of some PECs will be an additional 52 sites of the succession battle.
The logic of acting on provinces that did not perform in the latest elections and causing the ANC to lose the right to form a government might be choked by which province contributes to the in-ANC leadership contest. The dismal 17% and 19% performances in the two provinces will not have the force to invoke sanction as preparation for the next milestone, though logically legitimate. In the strictest sense of analysis, the continuation of the two PECs means that the same leadership which yielded the current election outcome is expected to generate new and different outcomes.
Arguably, the MK Party dynamic as an exogenous factor that affected the two disbandment-threatened provinces is a good reason for poor performance. Still, it does not change the loss of political power implications attached to it. At worst, it makes a plausible argument to open a debate on why the MK Party dynamic happened, a debate that might question the entire leadership of the ANC. It might bring into the centre the many unanswered questions mutedly entertained within the ANC and now openly deliberated by the SACP, Cosatu and Sanco.
The disbandment conversations are led by a post-election analysis framework which will recommend what non-performance deserves. In this whirlpool, the ANC has to deal with its decisions to establish a government of national unity, some of which have become political capital for the pending succession debate. The GNU introduced the dynamic of sufficient consensus onto the political landscape and, by default, a context of negotiating and renegotiating policy positions other ANC administrations might have taken.
The Bela Act is the immediate policy with which the GNU commitments were stretch-tested. The logic of opposition to it, which arguably might have persuaded President Ramaphosa to order a rethink of the contested sections, survived the Nedlac process. Only the ideological posture towards the latest agreement is the new political capital necessary to deflect the post-election analysis reports and the implications thereof.
The logic of survival and succession might be dominant and suffocating the political prowess the ANC has historically been about
The disbandment discussion now permeates all other policy considerations. Where grand political gains could have been made, the ANC had to settle for positions that left it compromised. The logic of survival and succession might be dominant and suffocating the political prowess the ANC has historically been about. The latest statement by deputy president Paul Mashatile that there will be no disbandment should be understood in its proper context.
His statement: “Overall we didn’t do well as the ANC. As you know, we got 40%, so we don’t want to blame KZN or Gauteng or any other province”, is the clearest signal that the May 29 election performance is one of the criteria used to decide on disbandment. In another comment, Gwede Mantashe retorted that the ANC cannot take a decision and leave it unattended; if the decision is to be made, it will have to wait for January.
Ownership of the ultimate recommendation “to disband or not” means ownership of the consequences that will follow and domination of the discourse that would have engulfed the ANC towards its subsequent elective conferences, including the 2027 ‘who succeeds Ramaphosa' one. The tug-of-war over who sanctions or stops the disbandment is a key point of contention, a crucial decision that will shape the inside-the-ANC political landscape.
The shape of postures about renewal with or without consequence management from within the leadership echelons has made renewal so alien to members that they do not understand it and cannot defend it. Parallel to the idea of a liberation movement consequence management practice and system is the readiness of leaders to embrace the consequences. As they say ... Eish, the succession debate is with us again!
Dr Lucky FM Mathebula is a public policy analyst and the founder of The Thinc Foundation, a think-tank based in Tshwane.
For opinion and analysis consideration, email Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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