Pressure on the ruling African National Congress (ANC) to act against corruption is intensifying internal conflict in the party between President Cyril Ramaphosa’s supporters and detractors.
Former president Jacob Zuma added to the heat this week in a letter to Ramaphosa accusing him of betraying the founders of the movement and acting on his ‘own desires to plead for white validation’.
The letter appears to have rallied Ramaphosa opponents, who want him to go.
Zuma wrote: ‘You write for your own desires to plead for white validation and approval, the worst betrayal of Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and others who sacrificed their own freedom for the ANC.’
News24 reported that sources present at the first day of the party’s national executive committee (NEC) meeting on Friday said Ramaphosa ‘remained firm’ that all who have been charged with corruption should resign from their roles in the party and state.
But NEC member Tony Yengeni – who was himself convicted of Arms Deal fraud, and jailed briefly, in the early 2000s – turned on Ramaphosa on Friday, calling on him to resign over accusations of vote-buying at the 2017 Nasrec conference at which he emerged the winner in the party’s leadership race.
Yengeni, sources said, was also unhappy about Ramaphosa characterising the ruling party as ‘Accused No 1’ in South Africa’s multi-billion rand corruption.
IOL reported that as the NEC meeting continued yesterday, others joined Yengeni in calling for Ramaphosa to resign. Its report said ‘sources within the ANC said seven other members of the NEC have called for the president to go’, including former Cabinet minister Nomvula Mokonyane.
A News24 report said that in a move seemingly intended to disarm his critics, the president revealed that he had approach the party’s integrity committee last week to explain the details of his CR17 campaign.
Zuma, whose presidency was defined by the loss of billions of rand to fraud and corruption, said in his letter – which he hoped would be ‘kept as an internal communication’ – that he wrote it ‘not to attack your person, but to engage in constructive and honest debate that our movement always encourages’.
However, pulling no punches, he wrote: ‘Until you … come clean to the ordinary members of our movement, your letters and statements will be construed as your attempts to appease those who, by their ill-gotten riches, catapulted you into the position you hold in our movement. In fact, your own spokesperson stands accused of the very corruption you decry in your letter. Your own son stands accused of the same allegations. Yet, you seek to divert attention from your own office and your household as you attribute the crime of PPE corruption to the ordinary ANC members.’
He told Ramaphosa that ‘it may be you that should hang your head in shame and not the members of the ANC’.
Public anger over the ANC’s ineffectual efforts to curb corruption, and the alleged continuing involvement of some of its senior members in corrupt deals, was heightened this week when disgraced former eThekwini mayor Zandile Gumede, implicated in local government corruption, was sworn in as a member of KwaZulu-Natal provincial legislature. It was later reported that she had been urged by the party’s provincial executive committee to take leave of absence from her post in the legislature.
The ANC’s woes were added to with the launch of Herman Mashaba’s new party, ACTIONSA, and his announcement that he had recruited two former ANC MPs, whistle blower Vygie Mentor and Makhosi Khoza, credited as being one of the first in Parliament to speak about against Jacob Zuma’s government.
Mashaba said his party would stand against the greed and failure which, after 26 years of democracy, had left South Africans ‘suffering’.