After a week of denials, clarifications, half-denials and threats, ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule will get his chance tomorrow to tell ANC top brass about his controversial meeting with former president Jacob Zuma.
Magashule has already spoken to ANC officials about the meeting, but they remain unconvinced. At a meeting of the "top six" on Monday, Magashule was told to explain himself in the media in the wake of the Sunday Times's disclosure of his "secret" meeting last week.
Tomorrow, Magashule is due to attend a meeting of the ANC's national working committee, where he will be asked to explain himself - again. The matter is also expected to discussed at the party's national executive committee meeting on September 28.
Sources said a plan to dislodge President Cyril Ramaphosa and to overturn the ANC had been discussed at the "secret" meetings.
Magashule told the top six meeting in Cape Town that he met Zuma to discuss uniting the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal, and to resolve an impasse in the Moses Mabhida region. He is said to have told ANC leaders, including Ramaphosa, that it was a coincidence that other ANC leaders were at the hotel when he met Zuma.
A number of ANC national working committee (NWC) members told the Sunday Times that the version Magashule gave the top six was contradicted by that of party leaders who attended the meeting last Thursday at the Maharani hotel on Durban's beachfront, and another meeting the day before at the Beverly Hills hotel in Umhlanga Rocks.
This comes as more details of the meetings emerge, showing the camp that backed Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma's failed presidential bid has regrouped and is plotting to unseat Ramaphosa.
Today the Sunday Times can reveal, based on interviews with some of those who attended the meetings, that Magashule's meeting with Zuma was attended by more than the four people named in the exposé last week, with lobbyists from the Eastern Cape, Free State, Mpumalanga and Limpopo also present...