Zuma could be out next year
Gwede says president can’t be removed now because of Polokwane resolution
ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe has mooted that President Jacob Zuma could be out of the Union Buildings by early next year if his preferred candidate loses in December.
Addressing foreign journalists in Johannesburg yesterday, Mantashe said the ANC was unable to remove Zuma now because of a resolution the party adopted in Polokwane that the president of the ANC should be the party’s presidential candidate.
Mantashe said it was easier to recall former president Thabo Mbeki in 2008 because he was no longer leader of the ANC. “We’re saying we [are] having six months to go to the national elective conference. Once we go to that elective conference, we elect a new leadership of the ANC.
“That is a very important milestone because beyond that point, many things are possible. What I am saying is that his term [as SA president] ends in 2019 but beyond December, the conversation becomes less complex,” Gwede said.
In the past six months, Zuma has survived two motions of no confidence against him within the party’s national executive committee (NEC).
His supporters are said to have told the last ANC NEC meeting that structure had no powers to remove a sitting president.
Mantashe concurred with this view yesterday, saying Zuma can only be removed by a special national conference between now and December.
Mantashe also labelled the calls for the next president of the party to be a woman as nothing but a campaign tool for those campaigning for former AU chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma on a female president ticket. “We don’t have anything called a woman president in the ANC,” he said.
“We look for the president of the ANC – male or female – because if we elect a female, that female will not be a female president but will be the president of the ANC. It’s as simple as that. The terminology that it must be a woman president is a manufacturing of terms that feeds campaigning.”
This comes as elements of the youth and women’s leagues as well as the party branch in Free State have come out in support of Dlamini-Zuma as the next ANC leader.
Mantashe also reiterated the call by the ANC NEC that there be a judicial commission of inquiry into allegations of state capture, involving the controversial Gupta family and prominent members of the party.