The RET faction backlash begins

When it wasn’t looting or enabling its friends the Guptas to loot, the “radical economic transformation” (RET) faction of the ANC was learning valuable lessons from its paid spin doctors, London-based PR firm Bell Pottinger. And the major application of that learning seems to be in the need to use both conventional and social media to carry on the attack against its enemy, President Cyril Ramaphosa.

He has pledged to clean up the party, and the country, on many levels. The RET people, loyal to former president Jacob Zuma, are feeling the noose of accountability tightening on them, much as that process may be excruciatingly slow.

Thus, it was no surprise to see the Lion of Nkandla roaring forth this weekend about how the ANC was “making no sense” since Ramaphosa took over and how “some powerful people” had “chased away the Guptas”.

Reading from the Bell Pottinger playbook – which amplified racial divisions by its clever construction of the narrative that “white monopoly capital” was to blame for all the ills of the country – Zuma accused white people of sowing division within the black community and elevating their spies to positions of power in the ANC.

And then ANC heavyweight and RET champion Tony Yengeni accused Chief Justice Raymond Zondo of openly backing Ramaphosa in the run-up to the ANC’s highest decision-making conference at the end of this year.

Yengeni, who did jail time for taking a bribe in the arms deal back in the ’90s, laid a complaint against Zondo with the Judicial Service Commission… cleverly adding weight to his argument.

Taken together, though, these outbursts from Zuma and Yengeni indicate that the RET crowd are hurting after the defeat, earlier this month, of their favourite for the premiership of the Eastern Cape.

The war of words has begun.