It is a repeat of Nkandla, Mbeki warns the ANC
The former head of state has lambasted the party for its recent conduct in Parliament. By
Former president Thabo Mbeki has whacked the ANC for blocking parliamentary inquiries into former Eskom boss André de Ruyter’s claims of cartels and corruption hobbling the utility.
He also compared the Phala Phala scandal facing President Cyril Ramaphosa with the Nkandla calumny, which finally took down the former head of state, Jacob Zuma.
Mbeki’s 17-page letter to ANC deputy president Paul Mashatile has been leaked, yet the spokesperson for the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, Anga Jamela, said: “We cannot authenticate anything that does not come from us directly.”
ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula has confirmed the veracity of the letter.
It is an excoriating and principled letter in which a furious Mbeki responds to Mashatile’s reply to parliamentary questions last week, when the newly minted deputy head of state stated his support for simple majoritarianism. “The bland statement that any majority party in the legislatures has an unfettered democratic right to use its numbers to impose on the legislature whatever decision of its choice is very wrong!”
He writes that South Africa is a “Constitutional Democracy” which imposes duties on political parties; South Africa is not run by a system of “Parliamentary (both his emphasis) sovereignty which the counter revolution (sic) repeatedly argues for”.
Mbeki usually refers to liberal opposition as a counterrevolution.
For page after page, Mbeki quotes Ramaphosa’s key August 2020 anticorruption speech back to the ANC.
The most quoted line is: “The ANC may not stand alone in the dock, but it does stand as accused number one.”
He says that in nine months since former spy boss Arthur Fraser laid the Phala Phala charges at the Rosebank Police Station, “none of the questions has been answered. The recent report by SARS Commissioner Edward Kieswetter that no record of the declaration to Customs has been found of the $580,000 deepens the puzzle about what exactly happened at Phala Phala farm.”
Mbeki writes that by squashing a multiparty committee (MPC) parliamentary investigation into the issue, the ANC has eroded public trust in it even further.
He uses voting figures showing that the ANC’s margin of victory had declined precipitously in the period from the 2004 general election until the last local government elections in 2021.
“Without doubt, the wrong positions we took about the Nkandla matter impacted the standing of the ANC with many among the masses of our people…
“It is equally without doubt that any wrong position we take with regard to the Phala Phala matter will also in equal measure or more, impact negatively on the standing of the ANC…
“The way we [the ANC] voted on 13 December 2022 to block the process of the formation of an MPC communicated the unequivocal statement to the masses of the people that we do not want Parliament to seek and gain a deeper and comprehensive understanding of the Phala Phala matter.”
Months later, in March this year, the party again blocked calls by the DA to form multiparty ad-hoc committees to investigate Phala Phala and corruption at Eskom.
“[T]he public would expect that our Government would act immediately to investigate serious allegations of criminality directed at weakening the SOEs [stateowned enterprises], such as those made by the outgoing Eskom CEO André de Ruyter when he said that Eskom was afflicted by severe instances of corruption, sabotage and criminal cartels…
“It will have come across to this public as very strange and disturbing that when a proposal was made that Parliament should undertake such a focused investigation into the alleged criminality at Eskom, we [the ANC] promptly voted against an eminently correct proposal [from the DA].”
Mbeki has written to Mashatile as deputy president of the ANC because Ramaphosa has repeatedly recused himself from ANC discussions on Phala Phala.