ANC in great danger of losing power and support, says Limpopo Premier Stan Mathabatha

12 Dec 2022

Stan Mathabatha, Limpopo premier, ANC provincial chairperson and leading nominee for the position of ANC chairperson in the upcoming Nasrec party conference, says that delegates should focus on thrashing out policies to save South Africa rather than leadership contestations.

Limpopo Premier Stan Mathabatha will wrestle for the position of ANC chairperson at the party’s upcoming national conference with the incumbent, Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Gwede Mantashe, and Deputy Finance Minister David Masondo, who also hails from Limpopo.

“I sincerely thank the branches of the ANC for nominating me. As you know, in the ANC you don’t stand up and say, I want to be in this or that position. You are identified by the branches. If I emerge and win this position it will place a huge responsibility on my shoulders.

“The ANC is experiencing a very difficult period in its lifetime. It needs people who will come up with renewed effort, renewed thinking, renewed energy to take it out of the quagmire that it finds itself in,” he said.

What is wrong with the ANC

The culture of entitlement, impunity and corruption within the leadership of the ANC has resulted in the mismanagement of state resources, lack of delivery of crucial services and the loss of support for the ruling party by the people.

Mathabatha said that after the ANC was unbanned and took the helm in South Africa, it attracted many people who did not share its historic vision and they began to erode the credibility of the party from within.

“We came back [from prison and exile] with the false impression that everybody who joined the ANC shared the same vision, the same understanding, the same theory and grounding. Today, you hear people running around saying ‘nominate me’ for this or that position. That is not in the culture of the ANC. In the ANC we believe in participatory democracy which finds its expression in democratic centralism. We are saying that you are in a collective, you serve in the collective.

“For me, this conference is very critical not only for ANC members but for South Africa as a whole, because of the global economy. The trends of the global economy are affecting the economy of South Africa in a big way. As the leading party, the ANC delegates should not go to the conference and concentrate on only electing leadership.

“They should focus on formulating economic policies that will pull our people out of the grinding poverty, that can take our people out of the load shedding they are currently facing. They should come with energy solutions, solutions to deal with load shedding, a strategy that will deal with all the challenges of this economy because that is what is going to be critical in the coming months and years,” he said.

The shortage of critical skills in the economy

Mathabatha said the most daunting challenge facing the South African economy at this stage is the shortage of skills, especially in state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

“The elephant in the room is the shortage of skills. For example, you find that people who are heading Eskom power stations, most of them have got less than five years of experience in what they are doing. That in itself tells you that we need to do what I call retooling, going back to look at the type of leadership we have at Eskom and other SOEs. Once you get our SOEs running efficiently, then I think we can be able, as the government, to direct the trend and direction of this economy.”

ANC NEC ‘most divided ever’

Mathabatha said he agrees with the view, first articulated by Nomvula Mokonyane, that the outgoing NEC is the most divided in the party’s history. He said the pre-2017 conference factional groupings did not disband after that conference.

“Even after the conference, these groupings continued to meet and plan things. You find that there are still the CR17 groupings and the NDZ17 groupings transformed under the banner of Radical Economic Transformation and raising the same issues they were raising before that conference. These groups remained like that throughout the term of this NEC and hence we say that this was the most divided NEC that we have ever had in the ANC.

“This [upcoming] conference must rise above petty differences, rise above factions. The delegates must humble us. They must make sure that they vote for comrades and not slates, they must vote for skills, for experience and they must vote for tried and tested leaders,” he said, adding that those elected must have shown exemplary leadership in the student movement, in the regions, in provinces and other structures.

Mathabatha said the factional divisions were affecting the operations of the ruling party.

“Look at the secretariat of the organisation, which is supposed to be the engine of the ANC, look at what is happening to it now. We don’t have a secretariat [Secretary-General Ace Magashule has been suspended and his deputy, Jessie Duarte, died this year]… and that is why you have Paul Mashatile acting as the secretary-general, and not in the position he was elected to, which is the treasurer-general. That in itself tells you that there is a problem at Luthuli House,” he said.

He said in recent years money was used to buy positions in the ANC. The new leadership must show a strong hand and regulate the election of its leaders and ensure money does not determine the leadership of the party.

Whether Ramaphosa should stay or go

Mathabatha declined to comment on whether he thinks ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa should get a second term, saying being nominated as a contender precludes him from speaking about other candidates.

He did say that it was wrong to blame all the problems in the party on Ramaphosa because these problems have been allowed to develop over a long period of time and are only being tackled now.

Dangers of cadre deployment

Many pundits blame the policy of ANC cadre deployment as the single biggest enabler of corruption, incompetence and mismanagement in the government and SOEs.

“I would only agree with that narrative if they say ‘the so-called cadre deployment’, because what is being complained about is not actually cadre deployment. I think some comrades abused the concept of cadre deployment for their own selfish and corrupt ends. If you say this person is a cadre, you are saying that that person is highly trained and highly experienced in a particular field. That is cadre deployment. It is not just a comrade in the ANC — you cannot just take a teacher and deploy him in a place where he doesn’t have the skills or experience and say that is cadre deployment.

“Cadre deployment is where you deploy a cadre where he is going to practise his skills and he will not be swayed by individuals. This conference must elect leaders who are going to be principled, who are not going to use policies of the ANC, such as cadre deployment, for their own personal benefit,” he said.

ANC still has a good story to tell

South Africans, who are victims of rolling blackouts, a stagnant economy, poverty, unemployment, crime and corruption are increasingly distancing themselves from the ANC. Recent research shows the party will get less than 50% of the vote in the 2024 general elections and could lose crucial provinces like Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.

Mathabatha admits that some of the losses suffered by the ruling party are self-inflicted. But he maintains that the ANC has done very well in transforming South African society and growing the economy since coming to power in 1994.

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“I don’t agree with the narrative that the ANC has been a dismal failure... You look where we were in 1994 as Africans in this country, you take rural areas for example. We had our people living in mud houses. Today you hardly find mud houses, you find houses that look like suburban houses. The standard of living changed after the ANC came into power. In the past, you could go to a village and find only a principal or a policeman had a car. Today… everyone has a vehicle, even students have vehicles.

“The social security that was implemented by the ANC has changed people’s lives, giving them social grants. Today, the economies of the townships and rural areas have changed. I’m not saying the ANC could not have done better... especially in economic development. We could have done better in developing small businesses.

“I’m not saying the ANC achieved everything it wanted to achieve. We could have done better in preventing corruption. There are many of our comrades who have been found to have stolen from the cookie jar. Some are being arrested and prosecuted. We should put in place more stringent monitoring mechanisms. But there are very few organisations, throughout the world, who have achieved more than what the ANC has achieved in the years that it has been in power,” he said.

Limpopo successes

In 2013, the Limpopo ANC and its provincial government were in crisis. The then Limpopo premier, Cassel Mathale, was accused by his detractors of being a lackey of former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema and allowing the latter to direct the awarding of crucial provincial and municipal tenders through his family trust, Ratanang. Many government departments and even municipalities were put under administration.

The ANC in the province hunted for someone who would bring stability. It cast the net wide and ended up agreeing on Mathabatha, who was serving as the South African ambassador in Ukraine.

Mathabatha said he had been able to achieve many things since taking the helm.

“I found a province which had all its systems collapsed, a province that was operating like there were no laws… whose finances were very, very poor. We then identified people with relevant skills to help change the situation. We succeeded in changing that picture and turning it upside down. Currently, you don’t have a department that gets a disclaimer, you hardly get a municipality that gets a disclaimer.”

Traumatic experiences in Ukraine

Mathabatha said his experiences as an ambassador in Ukraine had given him many life lessons. He said he understood the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine as a war between Russia and the West, using Ukraine as the battleground.

He said Ukrainians had been so resistant to Russia’s invasion because of deep resentment. He said Ukraine and many former Soviet Union states and East European countries which were in the Communist bloc had a deep hatred for Russia because of what happened during the Cold War.

“The Ukrainians and other states look at Russia in the same light we looked at apartheid South Africa,” he said.

He said spending time in Ukraine was very traumatic for him personally and for his family.

“The kind of racism in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries is unbelievable. I was a victim of racism when I went out shopping. My children were racially victimised and bullied in school. They were called monkeys, even by adult people. My son was assaulted on a school vacation because he was black and when his friends, white children of diplomats from countries like Britain, came to his rescue, they were beaten as well.

“When I came back [from Ukraine] I advised the Department of International Relations and Cooperation not to send a black family to be diplomats in Ukraine and other East European countries because of prevalent racism,” he said. DM

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