ANC leadership race belongs with the ballot, not business

BILLIONAIRE Patrice Motsepe has warned South African business to stay away from the ANC succession battle.

In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Times, Motsepe also urged the party to tackle corruption and be bold enough to admit its mistakes. The ANC, said Motsepe, should remember that the voter is always right.

“Business must be very careful, including people like myself, you’ve got to be very careful that you take a back seat and allow the ordinary people [to choose] because that leader of the ANC in the first instance must be a leader for the ordinary people, for the poor, for the marginalised and for the unemployed, not for us in business.”

Motsepe — a brother-inlaw to Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is also the ANC’s second-in-command and in the running to succeed President Jacob Zuma — would not pronounce on his preferred presidential candidate. Ramaphosa and AU Commission chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma are the frontrunners.

“I can tell you, you know that Patrice Motsepe is seriously conflicted across the board with everybody, totally,” he said.

“I have confidence and trust in the people of the ANC, all of them. And I can tell you that the candidate that will succeed will be the one that all our people will support.

“And we will . . . support and make sure that the leadership of the ANC continues to . . . put the hearts and minds of our people first, it’s critically important,” he said.

The ANC will choose a new leader at its 2017 elective conference.

On the issue of e-tolls, Motsepe said: “My father said to me as a child that the customer is always right.

“On the e-tolls, the voter is always right. And the same applies for our movement.

“The thinking and experiences of our people and their perceptions of our strengths and our weaknesses is critically important. So if there’s a message that all of us who grew in Mandela’s political party and movement should always remember, it is that it is the hearts and minds of our people that made the ANC great.

“Issues like corruption and the perception that it is those who’ve got political connections who succeed and get tenders, it is not good for our movement.

“It is critical that . . . the perception must always be that the best person will always succeed. Whether it is a tender or a contract or a partnership, the best one must always get it.

“And the issue of who you know or who you don’t know is the most unimportant and the most irrelevant. We’ve got to deal with those issues because it is a very serious issue.

“And where we’ve made mistakes, we stand up and say: please forgive me, but we will now get things done the right way.’

“There’s still so many of our people who have faith in the movement that brought democracy in South Africa.”

Motsepe also said it was critical to debunk the myth

I can tell you, Patrice Motsepe is conflicted across the board

that black business relied on state contracts. “Now, you must understand we are part of a different generation, we are part of a generation where our parents ran businesses during the years of apartheid in the ’60s, in the ’70s, in the ’80s, and those businesses were exceptionally successful.

“There were no tenders, there was no government, you know, but they were competitive . . . It’s incredible how the story of black business is so fundamentally misrepresented,” he said.

But, Motsepe added, it was important to also understand that privatepublic partnerships were crucial to growing business and entrepreneurship.

“A number of successful Afrikaner businesses in this country became successful because of state tenders. And not just in South Africa, worldwide . . . All over the world the biggest American, British, Chinese, German, English, Italian, French companies have an ethical, legal, moral relationship with government. We should do the same in this country.”