ANC’s step-aside rule - the central 2022 proxy battle for ultimate power

The newly elected KwaZulu-Natal leadership didn’t mince its words at the weekend — the step-aside rule must go. Finish and klaar. Limpopo, at its provincial general council on Monday, seemed softer, with recently re-elected ANC chairperson and Premier Stan Mathabatha talking review and refine, rather than scrap.

While Limpopo is regarded as being in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s fold, KwaZulu-Natal isn’t. Heavily contested since its adoption at the December 2017 Nasrec conference, the rule that those facing criminal charges are required to step aside falls slap bang into those dynamics. 

It’s a broad-sweep picture that goes beyond those two ANC provinces to other structures — and one that can still produce surprises as proxy battles are never straightforward.  

It’s all there — from Taliban to Focus and the odd play on a name even in a parliamentary debate just before the Eastern Cape ANC elective conference, when a shout of “Buya Mabuyane” greeted Eastern Cape ANC chairperson Oscar Mabuyane, whose name roughly translates as “he who returns”.

In 2017, the proxy fight was over expropriation without compensation which that year’s policy conference kicked into touch by referring both proposals, against and for, to branches for further discussion. At the December 2017 Nasrec elective conference, the win by the so-called Radical Economic Transformation (RET) grouping came at the last minute and involved some scuffles on the floor and a crucial qualification on not endangering food security and economic activity in various sectors.

Some four years later, unprecedented countrywide public hearings and substantial parliamentary processes came to nought as the ANC failed to rally numbers for a constitutional amendment to pass the two-thirds threshold in the House in early December 2021.

The Expropriation Bill, which provides for “nil compensation” for certain categories of land, such as land that is held for speculation or is abandoned, remains in the legislative pipeline. 

But the governing ANC is the master of proxy battles by policy. And in 2022 the step-aside rule goes to the heart of positioning, power and politics of a governing party that has seen its electoral support slide in the past four national and municipal elections. 

The two-thirds majority the ANC held in Parliament during the Thabo Mbeki presidency has diminished from 279 of the 400 seats in 2004 down to 230 after the 2019 elections. The 2016 municipal elections also cost the ANC control of South Africa’s economic heartland, Johannesburg, the administrative capital, Tshwane, and the Eastern Cape’s industrial hub, Nelson Mandela Bay. In the 2021 municipal elections, the ANC slid to 42% support in eThekwini, needing a coalition for control.

Short-term gains