Just days after Cyril Ramaphosa was elected ANC president at Nasrec in December 2017, Ace Magashule — who had been elected secretary-general but whose preferred presidential candidate had failed to emerge as the victor — declared: “It’s just a matter of five years, comrades. Focus, it’s just a matter of five years.”
Magashule was urging disgruntled members of his faction to work hard to ensure they toppled Ramaphosa and his “new dawn” at the next conference in five years’ time.
Unfortunately for him, those plans got nowhere. Instead he got the chop and was kicked out of the party.
On Monday, the ANC confirmed it has finally expelled its former president, Jacob Zuma, a man who has served in its Top 6 structures since 1994.
“Former president Jacob Zuma has actively impugned the integrity of the ANC and campaigned to dislodge the ANC from power, while claiming that he had not severed his membership. This conduct is irreconcilable with the spirit of organisational discipline and letter of the ANC constitution,” said ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula on Monday.
“Furthermore, former president Zuma has been running on a dangerous platform that casts doubt on our entire constitutional edifice. He has meted out a host of antirevolutionary outbursts, including mischievously calling into question the credibility of our electoral processes without cause and discrediting the rationale of our judicial system,” he added.
The ANC lost 71 parliamentary seats largely due to Zuma’s MK Party, which won 58 seats in its electoral debut. This is solely what Zuma’s expulsion is about
This is where the ANC drew the line on a man it had defended for almost 15 years.
This wasn’t the first time action was taken against Zuma. In 2005, then president Thabo Mbeki sacked Zuma as the deputy president of the republic after he was implicated in a corruption scandal.
But that action saw a groundswell of support among the rank and file of the ANC, with some in the party leadership vowing “to kill” for Jacob Zuma.
Mbeki was undermined at every turn in the build-up to the party’s watershed elective national conference where Zuma eventually emerged as party president in Polokwane, 2007.
The new ANC president became so powerful that the then national executive committee, which was largely made up of his supporters, forced Mbeki to resign as the president of the republic just eight months before the end of his second term.
The National Prosecuting Authority dropped all charges against Zuma, clearing the way for him to occupy the highest office. He was elected president of the republic in May 2009.
His tenure though was replete with impropriety.
From failure to declare his interests, to the Nkandla scandal, allegations of state capture and defying the Constitutional Court; the ANC stood by him and took “collective responsibility”. In parliament, it defended eight motions of no confidence in Zuma.
Journalists, NGOs and opposition parties who raised questions were labelled “puppets”, “counter-revolutionaries”, “anti-majoritarian liberal offensive” seeking regime change and “CIA agents”.
Like Magashule, Zuma rejected the Ramaphosa-led ANC. Relations soured even more when the Ramaphosa-led NEC forced him out of the Union Buildings in February 2018, just more than a year before the end of his second term.
While Ramaphosa admitted in an open letter that the ANC was accused number one in terms of corruption, and made serious concessions to the Zondo commission, Zuma took no accountability and instead walked out of the process, to never return.
Still, the ANC was not moved to act on his defiance of the commission, or the Constitutional Court instruction for him to go back.
Instead, when he was finally jailed for defying the Constitutional Court, Ramaphosa went out of his way and approved remission of thousands of prisoners — including Zuma — coincidentally on the same day Zuma was supposed to return to prison to complete his 15-month jail sentence.
For Mbalula to claim that Zuma’s ejection had anything to do with South Africa's “constitutional edifice” is disingenuous. Not with the long history of protecting the man’s outrageous behaviour.
The ANC lost 71 parliamentary seats largely due to Zuma’s MK Party, which won 58 seats in its electoral debut. This is solely what Zuma’s expulsion is about.
It remains to be seen what Zuma, a comeback king, will spring on South Africa and the ANC as his next move or in the next election.
It’s just a matter of five years, comrades.
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