MBEKI IS RIGHT ON ANC MYOPIA
Focus on Phala Phala misses the point of former president’s damning 17-page verdict on the party
ANC members are politically bankrupt and the party’s commitment to the constitution is questionable. This was the essence of Thabo Mbeki’s 17-page letter to Deputy President Paul Mashatile, which he discussed with the party’s top brass this week.
The ANC’s defensiveness over its leader is so ingrained, so reflexive, that Mbeki’s letter was immediately seen as an attack on President Cyril Ramaphosa over Phala Phala.
The former president chastised the party for using its parliamentary majority to prevent an impeachment inquiry into Ramaphosa over the $580,000 stashed in a couch at his Limpopo farm, money he says emanated from the sale of a prize buffalo to a Sudanese businessman.
Internally, all sorts of explanations were mulled to explain the attack, including Mbeki’s decades-long hatred of Ramaphosa, jealousy over Nelson Mandela’s preference that Ramaphosa should succeed him, even the fact that Ramaphosa beat Mbeki’s preferred Alfred Nzo for the position of deputy secretary-general back in the day.
Then came the hushed attacks on Mbeki, who has rightly been criticised over his silence during Jacob Zuma’s ruinous reign. There were attempts to cast him as bitter and vengeful after Luthuli House said the party’s top brass would meet its elder to discuss his views.
But all this misreads the spirit of the letter, which in essence says the ANC has lost its way. Its substance is an alarmingly accurate assessment of the ANC’s further fall from grace under Ramaphosa.
A closer reading shows the letter is a blistering attack on the ANC over its vacillating commitment to constitutional values and the cynicism with which it continues to conduct itself in parliament — a garish remnant of the Zuma era.
Aside from Phala Phala, Mbeki discussed alarming comments made two weeks ago by ANC parliamentary chief whip Pemmy Majodina, who was quoted by News24 as saying the constitution is “transitional”, it is time for the party to amend it — without specifics on how or where — and it “no longer serves the needs of the majority”.
Her comments were astounding, but more shocking was the silence in response to it from the party’s leadership. Until Mbeki’s letter.
“Renewal will have to include detailed exposure of our membership to the main policies of our movement precisely to help ensure that we have genuine cadres of the ANC, rather than mere card-carrying members!” he wrote.
“Recent comments by our National Assembly chief whip about the national constitution drew my attention precisely to the imperative to ensure such policy exposure to all our members … Obviously all these are extremely serious comments about the fundamental law of our republic, which the ANC put firmly on our statute book!
“I cannot guess what caused the chief whip to make the entirely false claims about the constitution that this was a ‘transitional constitution’ and ‘the constitution was no longer serving the needs of the majority’!”
Mbeki also took aim at the ANC for shooting down a DA parliamentary motion for an inquiry into Eskom. The motion was tabled after outgoing Eskom CEO André de Ruyter alleged the involvement of high-level ANC politicians in corruption crippling the power utility.
The National Union of Mineworkers, the largest union at Eskom, told the FM it supported such an inquiry and that the ANC should launch a parliamentary probe of its own.
“There are strong indications that behind the very serious and sustained problems at Eskom is a counter-revolutionary force which has worked radically to weaken the company!” Mbeki wrote. The same kind of inquiry which uncovered state capture and the capture of the South African Revenue Service was needed at Eskom.
“It was very wrong that we took a decision to veto the initiation of a parliamentary process specifically focused on investigating the criminal activities at Eskom,” Mbeki wrote.
“It will have come across to the 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 promptly voted against an eminently correct proposal.”
Mbeki warned against the ANC misconstruing its majority in parliament and challenged Mashatile for his comments during National Assembly questions to the effect that on Phala Phala, the “majority [the ANC]” rules.
“The bland statement that any majority party in the legislature has an unfettered democratic right to use its numbers to impose on the legislature whatever decision of its choice is very wrong! No political party, including the majority party, has a legal right to block the National Assembly from exercising its oversight over the executive!” Mbeki wrote.
While the party leadership may have met Mbeki to discuss his concerns, there is little chance of a lightbulb moment; it has shown itself to be hopelessly incapable of shedding the habits destroying its brand and eroding its electoral support.
It remains hopelessly incapable of reform or correction.