Johannesburg - The chief parliamentary whip of South Africa’s ruling
African National Congress threw his support behind Deputy President Cyril
Ramaphosa as the party’s next leader and said the ANC is in danger of losing
national power in two years.
While the ANC has told its members not to publicly
discuss the race to succeed President Jacob Zuma as party leader, Jackson
Mthembu said Ramaphosa’s position as deputy means he must become its next
president. Ramaphosa’s main rival for the job is Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, a former
cabinet minister and the president’s ex-wife who just ended her term as
chairwoman of the African Union Commission. As chief whip, Mthembu leads the
ANC’s 249-member caucus in the 400-seat parliament.
“The ANC created the position of deputy president precisely
so that you have a person who is ready to take over should anything happen to
the president,’’ Mthembu, 58, said in an interview in his parliamentary
office in Cape Town. “As an ANC member, I put such a person to be deputy
because I was preparing that person to be president - case closed.”
The debate over the party leadership comes at a time when
the ANC risks losing power in general elections in two years, Mthembu said.
It’s worst-ever electoral performance in August municipal polls saw it cede control
of the economic hub of Johannesburg and the Tshwane municipality, which
includes the capital, Pretoria. Its share of the national vote fell to 54.5
percent, a 7.7 percentage point decline from general elections three years ago,
and another drop of that magnitude in 2019 could relegate it to the opposition.
The party’s at a “tipping point,” he said.
Election nightmare
“It’s only a fool who will not see that reality,” Mthembu
said. “Never in my wildest dreams, or never in any of my nightmares, did I dream
that we can lose Tshwane, we can lose Johannesburg.”
The ANC, which has held power since South Africa’s first
multiracial elections in 1994, is riven by factions and is failing to
respond to the needs of the poor and deliver sound economic policies, he said.
A number of members of the caucus Mthembu leads hold key positions in ANC
bodies that will determine who replaces Zuma.
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“The ANC must approach this election as a step for self
correction,” he said. “We must come out ready to confront in a meaningful way
the malaise that is facing our organization.”
Partly because of the ANC’s 62 percent majority in
Parliament, Mthembu said that in the past the caucus has been soft on the
cabinet. He criticized how party lawmakers and ministers rallied around the
president after the nation’s graft ombudsman found that taxpayer money was used
to pay for a R215 million ($16 million) upgrade of Zuma’s private home.
Constitutional violation
The Constitutional Court ruled in March that Zuma
violated the law by not abiding by her recommendation that he repay some of the
money, and ordered him to comply.
The problem is some members of the ANC are focused on
retaining power for themselves, Mthembu said.
There are “fiefdoms in various parts of the country,
fiefdoms that by the way have nothing to do with what the ANC wants to achieve,
fiefdoms that have everything to do with who must ascend to what positions,” he
said. They have “nothing to do with how we serve our people better.”