Mbete continues with slow campaign
National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete still has her eye on the ANC presidency, despite her campaign seeming to falter.
National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete still has her eye on the ANC presidency, despite her campaign faltering.
Hardly a week goes by when the two frontrunners, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and MP Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma are not vying for votes by addressing ANC structures, but Mbete has been notably absent from the campaign trail.
Mbete, who is also the ANC’s national chairwoman, said she found it difficult to juggle her roles in government and the party and campaigning.
“The team have been running the campaign so, in other words, I from time to time catch up with them, they brief me, they ask me questions. It is a campaign which does not have money so we just talk to try and make each other feel good and I don’t know this thing about campaigning,” she said.
Mbete said many had asked her make herself available but funding was a problem.
“Turns out we need money and I’m like ‘well, I don’t have money’. People who believe in me, who believe I am the right leader [will vote for me].”
Mbete’s campaign said predictions from branches seem to narrow down the contest to one between Ramaphosa, Mbete and ANC treasurer-general Zweli Mkhize, who also has his sights on leading the party.
Mkhize and various ANC provincial chairmen and chairwomen have been pushing for a “unitary” approach to ANC leadership to minimise contestation and eliminate slate politics.
Some branches, according to Mbete’s team, are looking to the ANC chairwoman for the position of president with Mkhize as her deputy, or for her to deputise under Ramaphosa. She said she would have no problem with Mkhize as her deputy as they had come a long way together.
But Mbete did not agree with Zuma’s compromise solution, proposed at the national policy conference, that the losing presidency candidate should be made ANC deputy president.
“People stand for specific positions. These people did not stand for deputy president. There is a team of people who stood for deputy president … you can’t just abandon them and dump them and now go for somebody else.”
On who she would like to see in the top structure of the ANC, Mbete mentioned Gauteng deputy chairman and premier David Makhura, although she was aware that the province wanted to keep him in the provincial structures.
Others were Police Minister Fikile Mbalula, although Mbete said he was reluctant, and National Council of Provinces chairwoman Thandi Modise.
Mbete already had some ideas on changing things if she were elected president. This included reducing the size of the Cabinet, which she said was too big. The public service had to be depoliticised and old directorsgeneral with experience brought back into the fold.
On the issue of state capture, Mbete said an inquiry needed to be concluded before campaigning starts for the 2019 elections.
“The last thing we need is having this kind of thing lingering in the air. We’ve got to clean up our country because this thing of corruption is un-ANC.”
It was regrettable that international law enforcement agencies such as the FBI were investigating corruption in SA. “I think as soon as … there were sounds and voices and it seemed like there was something untoward, we should have acted,” she said.