ACE’S ENDGAME
As the ANC assembles a crack team to handle its legal response to Ace Magashule, the suspended secretary-general is seeking support from all quarters. But even Jacob Zuma seems fed up
The ANC’s battle royale has entered the terrain of the courts. The pieces are moving after party secretary-general Ace Magashule clumsily activated his own personal doomsday clock.
Last Friday, Magashule lodged an application to set aside his temporary suspension, thumbing his nose at the party’s request that he apologise for his conduct after he was suspended under the step-aside rule earlier this month.
The ANC announced this week that it will be opposing his application — and that it has recruited some of the best legal minds in the country to handle the matter. These include advocates Wim Trengove, Ngwako Maenetje, Fana Nalane and Buhle Lekokotla, with Ledwaba Mazwai as instructing attorneys.
It speaks volumes about the magnitude of the case and exactly how much is at stake.
The party made its announcement after a meeting on Monday of its remaining top six officials: President Cyril Ramaphosa, Deputy President David Mabuza, treasurer Paul Mashatile, party chair Gwede Mantashe and deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte (now acting in Magashule’s post).
Magashule was suspended by the national executive committee (NEC) after he refused to step aside from his position pending the outcome of a criminal case relating to a R255m asbestos contract awarded during his tenure as Free State premier.
The ANC is battling to restore its image after a decade of corruption-related scandals under former president Jacob Zuma that has culminated in a substantial loss of electoral support (a 10 percentage-point difference between 2004 and 2019).
In an attempt to restore its integrity, the party resolved at its 2017 Nasrec conference that all members facing formal charges should step aside from their positions pending the outcome of court cases against them.
The secretary-general is the most highprofile leader affected by the rule, but he’s by no means alone. Duarte last week confirmed that the rule has been applied to about 30 members occupying party and government posts across the country.
But Magashule reacted dramatically to the turn of events, penning a suspension letter of his own to Ramaphosa and declaring that he would be appealing the decision on his suspension (and would remain in office pending the outcome of that process).
What it means: Embattled Ace Magashule’s lastditch legal bid sets the scene for a protracted court battle with the ANC
At a subsequent special meeting — Magashule was booted out of this virtual event — the NEC decided he should publicly apologise for both his suspension of Ramaphosa and his refusal to comply with party instructions.
Instead of doing so, he lodged an application in the high court on Friday to lift his suspension. At the same time, he doubled down on his socalled suspension of Ramaphosa — a decision he had made without any input from party structures — asking the court to enforce it.
Magashule is represented in his legal action by advocate Dali Mpofu, formerly a member of the EFF leadership.
Back in 2019, Mpofu scored a rare victory in a case against the ANC. In that matter, the court returned ANC North West chair Supra Mahumapelo to his post and reinstated his executive after the party’s national leaders had dissolved the structure.
By taking legal action, Magashule has drawn the ANC into uncomfortable terrain. On the whole, the party frowns on members hauling it to court — a relatively new phenomenon in its 100-plus-year history.
Ironically, it was Magashule who was at the heart of the case that emboldened members to take such action, and which set something of a precedent for political battles to be settled legally.
In 2012, disgruntled members of the ANC in the Free State brought a case arguing that there were huge irregularities in the run-up to the province’s elective conference, which had returned Magashule to the post of provincial party chair in an unopposed election.
The Constitutional Court ruled that the conference had indeed been irregular, and ordered a rerun of the vote.
Since then, insiders familiar with the party’s legal battles say about 25 cases have been brought against the ANC by disgruntled members. Only one has been won — the case brought by Mahumapelo (who, ironically, is now also on suspension).
Magashule’s battle isn’t the only one the ANC is facing in court.
This week, party members in the Northern Cape aligned with the suspended secretary-general launched an urgent bid to halt the province’s elective conference — set for this weekend — and block Ramaphosa ally Zamani Saul from being re-elected as provincial chair.
Though large geographically, the Northern Cape is one of the smallest ANC provinces when it comes to member numbers and the size of the delegation it sends to the national elective conference. But it does provide a crisp indication of how the balance of forces has shifted away from the Zuma faction, now loosely headed by Magashule.
In 2017, Saul was set to contest the post of chair against then premier and Zuma ally Sylvia Lucas. Only, she withdrew from the race on the day of the conference, once she realised the numbers were against her.
This time around, the so-called radical economic transformation (RET) faction has been unable to even agree on a candidate to face Saul — indicative, insiders say, of how that faction has effectively been neutralised in the province.
The court bid by remnants of this RET brigade is a last-ditch attempt to regroup and mount a challenge.
Of course, Magashule himself has previously — and repeatedly — chastised ANC members for taking the party to court.
At one point, the ANC even contemplated a national resolution to expel any member who took the party to court. The decision was never passed, as it would have infringed on the individual legal rights of members.
And it is this point that is now at the heart of Magashule’s application.
“I am entitled to various rights which flow directly from my membership of the ANC, from the ANC constitution and from the constitution of the republic which have been breached, violated and/or infringed by the conduct of the respondents,” he argues in his court papers.
The legal battle is likely to take months to be resolved. And Magashule will be sure to try to use that time in his favour, if events this week are anything to go by.
He used the occasion of Zuma’s appearance in court — he’s on trial for alleged arms deal corruption — as an opportunity to air his grievances against the ANC (in direct violation of the conditions attached to his suspension).
Magashule, speaking outside the court, was defiant: “Nobody under a democracy will ban me, nobody will remove the ANC from me, nobody. I will never leave the ANC comrades, I will die in the ANC.”
Not that Zuma appeared to look too kindly on all this. Instead, he seemed to take issue with his platform being hijacked by Magashule and his battles.
Speaking in isiZulu, the former president told the crowd that party leaders should not destroy the ANC in the guise of supporting him, and that they should use other platforms if they wanted to fight the party.
Not helping matters was that Zuma’s own supporters were booed by the crowd outside the courthouse.
The ANC’s KwaZulu-Natal executive committee has had to manage a fragile political balance in the province. Supporting Zuma in court is considered part of that process, and so party chair Sihle Zikalala and secretary Mdumiseni Ntuli were on hand on the day (not wearing
ANC regalia, as per an NEC decision).
There they were booed by a crowd that had been bused in from the Free State (Magashule’s stronghold) and Mpumalanga, according to Ntuli.
Those numbers would swell, if Magashule were to have his way. He told the crowd that at Zuma’s next court appearance “we will bring the whole Free State here ... not just ANC members — the whole Free State”.
But that could well just be hot air masking Magashule’s own insecurities.
In part, he seems to have approached the courts to tackle his suspension rather than relying on his support inside the party, because he fears he has little outside his own province.
Nobody under a democracy will ban me, nobody will remove the ANC from me, nobody. I will never leave the ANC comrades, I will die in the ANC
Ace Magashule