ANC’s top leadership shown up

Gwede Mantashe, the immediate past secretary-general and now national chair of the ANC, is a deeply wounded man.

We are barely three months into deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo’s inquiry into state capture and evidence is mounting that the CEO of the governing party during all the years the Gupta family was allowed to plunder the state may have aided and abetted the thieves, or at best stood by idly as they helped themselves to the nation’s coffers.

Pretty much what former president Jacob Zuma also did, and more.

Under oath, ANC veteran and former public enterprises minister Barbara Hogan this week told the inquiry that Mantashe was in fact by Zuma’s side when, on Sunday October 31 2010, she was summoned to a meeting where she was summarily dismissed and informed that she would be “redeployed” as an ambassador to Finland.

By the time Zuma – and Mantashe – fired her, mlunkazi (the white lady), as Zumasupporting trolls were quick to remind us of her skin colour this week on social media, had become a pain in the butt.

She had refused to obey Zuma’s instruction to appoint Siyabonga Gama as Transnet CEO, had let go Jacob Maroga as CEO of Eskom against the president’s wishes and had failed to ensure that SAA scrapped a lucrative route from Johannesburg to Mumbai so that a Gupta family-related business alliance with Jet Airways could then take it over.

With tens of billions of rands at stake in the business, Zuma wanted Gama appointed over the Transnet board’s top candidate, current Telkom CEO Sipho Maseko, who was the front-runner for the job.

And this despite the fact that Gama was undergoing a disciplinary process at the time.

Hogan this week recalled Zuma’s fury when, a year before her firing, she refused to be bullied to return Maroga as the power utility’s CEO.

Maroga had resigned and the Eskom board had approved.

Zuma wanted him back, insisting he had not resigned.

That same day Maroga rocked up at his Eskom office, accompanied by Jimmy Manyi and a few others.

The plan collapsed when Hogan threatened to reveal all in parliament.

You see, like many in the ANC – including immediate past deputy president and now president Cyril Ramaphosa – Mantashe would like to wash his hands of the mess he’s been part of, just like Pontius Pilate of the Bible did when Jesus was about to be crucified.

He has been spoilt by a decade of either pointing fingers at others, cleverly explaining himself away or, to use a word he introduced to our lexicon, “mantashing” (to change your mind abruptly and contradict your earlier position).

Not many ANC leaders have managed to get away with grumpiness and cantankerous outbursts towards the media the way he did, only to turn around the next minute and charm the hell out of them and still remain the fourth estate’s favourite uncle.

So, at the back of his mind, Uncle Gweezy’s been quietly confident that he would survive anything – until, of course, Hogan’s testimony put both Zuma and Mantashe at the same crime scene.

Not that it was the first time, if you all remember.

Two months ago, bank executives revealed at the inquiry that the ANC had invited them to its headquarters, Luthuli House, to try to convince them to reverse their decisions to close Guptarelated bank accounts.

The country's big four banks, Standard Bank, Absa, Nedbank and FNB, had closed Gupta-linked bank accounts, citing suspicious transactions and reputational risk.

Swiftly, during Hogan’s three-day testimony, the ANC’s national spokesperson during Mantashe’s tenure as secretarygeneral, Zizi Kodwa, announced that the party would be testifying next month and would be led by its former CEO.

In that powerful position he occupied, Mantashe knew everything.

And I mean, everything. He would have known about the work of the party’s so-called deployment committee, an organ of the ANC that has courted controversy since the dawn of democracy and on which Hogan’s testimony also shone a spotlight this week.

Now, few people would argue convincingly – or maybe I should say I’m not one of them – that a governing party should not have a mechanism of ensuring that not only are its policies implemented, but that this would in all probability be best left to its most capable and committed cadres.

The fact of the matter, though, is that the ANC’s deployment committee has been a toothless bulldog, beholden to the dominant faction of the time, with no real expertise or proper mechanism to fulfil its supposed mandate.

A sitting president would then become the deployer-inchief, with everyone else either concurring, or living with their president’s decision.

And when you have a rogue for president – which was the case under Zuma – the problems inherent in the way the ANC has gone about doing this become even more glaring.

Did Ramaphosa sit quietly while the big boss was taking the country to the dogs?

What did Mantashe do, 365 days a year for 10 years, while all of this was happening?

Was Kodwa’s job to say what he was told to say, hiding from the rest of us the real truth of what was happening?

If these grownup men and leaders were not complicit, they will have to explain why they were useless stooges whose only job was to rubberstamp their president and his friends’ reign of terror.

You see, like many in the ANC [Gwede] Mantashe would like to wash his hands of the mess he’s been part of