Backing Dlamini-Zuma is a mistake
FRONTING Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma sets a wrong precedent.
The call to have a female leader in the ANC, which is gaining momentum, has the potential to split the party. The timing of such a move is wrong, coming when the party is more factionalised than ever before.
Rallying behind the ANC Women’s League’s preferred frontrunner is more suicidal than supporting Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa or any other candidate like Baleka Mbete.
The perception that Dlamini-Zuma, ex-wife of current President Jacob Zuma, is fronting for the conservative faction associated with the so-called “premier league” to defeat the ends of justice is a setback for the ANC.
Fronting a person outside the top six positions sets a bad precedent, which will tear the movement apart. This will send the wrong message that even an additional member, as long as he or she is a card-carrying member for more than five years, can occupy any position without merit.
It’s not a written policy of the ANC that the deputy president or anyone from the top six leadership will assume the presidency when the president steps down, but it makes more sense than to pick up just anyone for factional reasons.
Can the ANC afford a situation where an additional member of the branch wants to be the provincial chairperson?
Dlamini-Zuma may be the preference of the faction that manipulates party processes but her association with her ex-husband will haunt her. Members who are morally conscious will wage a bitter fight to reform the ANC and end the manipulation, building up to the elective summit in 2017.
Logically, it would have been wise for Dlamini-Zuma to rise from within the top six. Her ambition to lead is putting the ANC in peril, where it may not regain the ground it lost under her ex-husband’s failed leadership. The electorate are likely to punish the ANC for undermining its intelligence.
Ramaphosa is playing his cards well in the public gallery, humiliating his opponents in the Dlamini-Zuma faction. He appears sober and interested in stabilising troubled government, which is waging war against itself while the opposing faction looks clueless about the national interests.
The Dlamini-Zuma faction may win the elective conference in 2017 but the ANC under her watch will be long dead before the 2019 general elections.
Phaswana Rofhiwa University of Venda