Who came first in the succession race, the ANC branches or its senior leaders?
I am impelled to rephrase President Jacob Zuma’s remarks in November 2015 on who comes first between the ANC and democratic South Africa, after the party announced this week that it had issued a decree gagging its branches from debating the leadership race.
As the ANC top brass will admit, identifying who the guilty party that “unleashed the archers of demons” around the debate on the next person to ascend to the ANC throne shouldn’t be as difficult as unravelling that century old chicken and egg riddle.
In her conceited nature, deputy scribe Jessie Duarte would have known when she announced the ANC’s national working committee’s diktat to branches that the fault lines in the party’s protocol point to the party’s top echelons at 54 Pixley Seme Street in downtown Joburg.
Instead of simply sending out a communiqué to the branches, the NWC should be directing that to its hotheads and megalomaniacs at the top – starting with Jacob Zuma, Cyril Ramaphosa and Bathabile Dlamini.
They, and not branches, are the head honchos watering the emotions of ordinary folks with contradictory and conflicting messages about the party’s principles and values.
This was more glaring last weekend when Zuma, Ramaphosa and Mantashe addressed party members during the provincial rallies marking the party’s provincial 105th anniversary celebrations.
Zuma might, in his own defence, perhaps seek refuge behind the issue of principle and claim that he was merely addressing the gender issue when he said it was time a woman took over the ANC reins.
But as his conscience will tell him, his assertions contradicting the party’s tradition on the deputy president succeeding the incumbent revealed his vested interest in the leadership race.
Even more telling was the timing of his statements, coming shortly after the ANC Women’s League’s pronouncement of Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma as their preferred candidate.
Ramaphosa is not blameless either.
He knows he could have waited before stoking the succession fires by pronouncing his ambition. But he might have thought: “I don’t want to commit the same grievous mistake that Kgalema Motlanthe did ahead of Mangaung in 2012” by playing the reluctant politician and resorting to quiet diplomacy.
What the NEC was trying to do by issuing a diktat was to put out the fires that are threatening to ravage Africa’s oldest liberation movement.
They needed to.
On Monday, for instance, a colleague from a rival media company posted pictures of ANC members at a Limpopo branch fighting over who should become the next president of the party.
He followed up the tweet, of last Sunday’s events, with a picture of one of the vehicles that had its windows smashed during the brawl at Ga-Modjadji, outside Tzaneen.
And the day before, in Rustenburg, a group of people clad in ANC regalia stormed a North West Business Forum meeting called to help rebuild the party.
Never mind that the group’s leader is named Vusi Wolf, their actions underscore the leaders’ speeches so often laden with divisive and violent overtones.
No remorse, no penance.
Because there’s never retribution for their pig-headed actions.