It was a blistering week in politics, but we are now used to those. Yet, big questions remain, chief among them being how big will the split in the ANC be?
As we pointed out in our leaders last week, the main effect of the way the no-confidence debate unfolded is that it made the divisions in the ANC much more rancorous, much more visible and much more urgent.
As if on cue, President Jacob Zuma did what he always does in crisis situations: he throws himself into the arms of his most loyal supporters.
This time it was in the Free State, where ANC provincial leader Ace Magashule said on Friday that MPs in the ANC who voted against Zuma "must resign voluntarily".
Magashule said MPs who disobeyed party instructions were forcing the ANC to kick them out.
He also accused some in the party’s national structure of working with the EFF and DA. "We have ample evidence [that] some are actually working with the DA — I’m just talking nationally — to dislodge the ANC out of power," he was reported as having said.
Zuma then addressed the party faithful in Parys in the Free State on Sunday, reading from the ANC constitution sections that describe it as a serious offence to — you guessed it — work with parties outside the ANC alliance and to bring the party into disrepute.
In a particularly revealing moment, he said of the party rebels: "You decide to use your conscience. Unheard of, you were sent there [to Parliament] by the ANC."
The particular way the president described the situation reveals the nature of the growing split in the ANC, one that the no-confidence debate neatly illustrated.
A proportion of ANC MPs and senior members — let’s call them the constitutionalists — believe their ultimate responsibility is to the national Constitution; and the party is the vehicle that puts the Constitution into effect.
On the other side of the divide are the party faithful, who believe the Constitution might be the legal framework, but their primary responsibility is to the party.
As a matter of law, as several opposition MPs pointed out during the no-confidence debate, the interpretation of the constitutionalists is correct; but as a matter of practical politics in a proportional representation system, the party reigns supreme.
Dlamini-Zuma might claim that 'radical economic transformation' is nothing new, but we all know this is not the ANC of old
The difference between the two groups does not just vest in this difference of arcane legal nuances. You can see traces of the different approaches in everything from economic policy to race.
Those in the party faithful group tend to use dog-whistle politics when it comes to race, claiming they are not trying to mobilise on a racial basis, but they raise race nevertheless.
A good example was a speech delivered by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma last week. According to her Twitter account, she said: "The economy is in the hands a few who happen to be white and male."
This kind of phraseology, frequently used in party-faithful meetings, allows Dlamini-Zuma to signal to her supporters that she is racially cognisant, while at the same time pretending she is not singling out a particular race.
Of course, the economy is not "in the hands" of anyone; it is a free-moving, competitive market system. But it behoves her notion of complicity and culpability that she sees it as manipulated by a clique of puppeteers who "happen to be white and male", as it has behoved conspiracy theorists for years.
Contrast that approach to ANC MP Makhosi Khoza’s, who told the Duke Menell Media Exchange conference this weekend that "it does not matter whether the motion has been brought by opposition parties, but what matters is voting with a moral conscience".
The country belonged to everybody, she said. "We are all in this together."
She sounded so much more like the ANC of old: firmly nonracial, collaborative and inclusive. She didn’t single out anyone for blame or to be targeted.
She made me recall, somewhat sadly, Nelson Mandela’s grand moral universe and its comprehensive and wide-ranging appeal.
Dlamini-Zuma might claim that "radical economic transformation" is nothing new, but we all know this is not the ANC of old, which distinguished itself from Black Consciousness groups by championing nonracialism and collaborative engagement.
It is constructed of materials of prejudice, it mobilises on the basis of selfishness dressed up as righteousness and it flirts with conspiracy theories of the far left and the far right.
It is a philosophy contrary to a functional government in a modern state and the thoughtful members of the ANC know that.
That is why in the end, as Magashule predicts, they will have to leave.
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