ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule’s time is officially up.
With no sign that he’ll voluntarily step down, he has handed President Cyril Ramaphosa and the rest of the national executive committee (NEC) a potential headache as they must now decide whether to suspend him.
Late in March, the party’s highest decision-making body gave Magashule, who’s facing corruption charges related to his time as Free State premier, 30 days to step aside in line with a resolution pending the outcome of the criminal matter.
Magashule confirmed to Business Day that Thursday was the official deadline but he hadn’t stepped down. He said he would announce his decision after informing the ANC’s top six leaders, who aren’t scheduled to meet until the weekend.
A key player in another factional battle that has threatened to derail Ramaphosa’s presidency since he won the party’s leadership in 2017, Supra Mahumapelo, the ANC’s former chair in the North West, was suspended for five years for bringing the organisation into disrepute.
The ANC, which is struggling to restore its corruption-scarred reputation, is also waiting to hear if its former leader, Jacob Zuma, will accept the Constitutional Court decision on whether he is guilty of contempt of a court order without a fight. Unlike his successor, who subjected himself to hours of grilling by the Zondo commission into state capture, Zuma defied the inquiry and accused deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo of bias.
All of this presents a challenge to Ramaphosa if he is to deliver on his pledge at the inquiry to cleanse and renew the ANC. Talking up his reformist credentials, Ramaphosa went as far as to say that the scourge of corruption was the reason for the governing party’s electoral decline in recent years.
Zuma never accepted that governance failures during his presidency were behind the ANC losing key metros in local elections five years ago.
Now the ANC faces a test on whether it will act on the NEC decision and suspend Magashule. The next scheduled meeting of the party’s decision-making body between national conferences is next weekend.
If Magashule is forced out, Mahumapelo exhausts the party’s appeal process without being reinstated and Zuma is sent to jail, this would lay the ground for internal instability and perhaps a split in the party.
ANC insiders say that while the trio have lost sympathy, they have not necessarily lost support within the party.
Speaking under oath at the state capture commission, Ramaphosa was more frank than ever before about why the ANC has lost confidence.
“Electoral support of the ANC went down because of corrosive corruption which people found abhorrent,” he said. “We need a renewal.”
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