The ANC’s succession battle used to be one of the highlights of the political calendar. Now it’s dull and unimaginative.
There is the strange “assassination attempt” on deputy president Paul Mashatile, the runner-up for the post, reported on weeks after it happened.
Then there is ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula’s clampdown on succession talk — a common thread in ANC succession politics — when it is an open secret that his own campaign for the post is in full swing.
Reports of businessman Patrice Motsepe’s name being thrown into the ring is another familiar addition. Though he was nominated by a single Limpopo branch before the 2022 national conference, it is a stretch.
Reality is the ANC is a 40% party facing a gruelling local government election by January 2027, the year it will also elect a successor to Cyril Ramaphosa. The party will then have just two years to regroup before it faces the electorate for its potentially apocalyptic 2029 general election campaign.
Whoever succeeds Ramaphosa will have to be strong enough to, at best, stay the ANC’s electoral decline. To do this the party will have to address the crisis it is facing in KwaZulu-Natal.
The entry of former president Jacob Zuma’s MK party into the electoral pot last year cause the ANC’s tally of the vote to plunge from 54% in 2019 to just 16.9% in the province.
The 2021 local election and subsequent by-elections painted a worrying picture that it was on the ropes, slapped by an electorate that was itself battered by the ANC’s incessant infighting, crime, corruption and service delivery failure. The IFP was on the ascent and would have fared far better in the 2024 election had Zuma not entered the fray.
By-elections since May last year show that the IFP’s support continues to strengthen in KwaZulu-Natal. According to analyst Wayne Sussman, writing for the Daily Maverick, in by-elections in Umzumbe in June last year the party won three wards off the ANC.
Two days later in Zululand, when MK won a ward off the ANC, the IFP quietly maintained its support, and on July 18 in another round of by-elections the IFP picked up its fifth ward for the year — even with MK in the picture.
In December, the IFP grew its support in Mtubatuba and again in February in rural northeastern KwaZulu-Natal.
On Thursday, MK hit the headlines for taking a ward from the ANC in Mandeni, but another less reported part of the story is the incredible swell in support there by the IFP — from 13% in 2021 to 30%. The IFP is clearly quietly on the rise in KwaZulu-Natal.
There is a delusional theory in the ANC that if Zuma, now 83, were to die or become too old, the party would simply disappear. That may be true in the long run, but it will hardly happen overnight.
The ANC also has as the front-runners in its succession race two candidates who are markedly less popular than the incumbent, even nationally. In KwaZulu-Natal, Mashatile and Mbalula are outsiders.
The Brenthurst Foundation found in an opinion survey last month that Mashatile is among SA’s least favoured politicians (Mbalula did not feature in the questionnaire).
The survey confirmed that the IFP is gaining support in KwaZulu-Natal at the expense of MK and the ANC, even under Ramaphosa, who surveyed as the country’s most popular politician.
Instead of continuing its succession rituals the ANC should be working flat-out to regain its footing in KwaZulu-Natal — including through identifying a potential candidate linked to the province.
As the VAT impasse showed, the ANC remains in denial about the precariousness of its political fortunes.
• Marrian is Business Day editor-at-large.
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