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Party should never have put Zuma’s interests above its own, says ANC elections head

Party should never have put Zuma’s interests above its own, says ANC elections head
Former SAA Chairperson Dudu Myeni. (Photo: Gallo Images / Rapport / Deon Raath)
Chris Makhaye
By Chris Makhaye
3 Mar 2024
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As the election day of reckoning draws closer, the ruling African National Congress is under siege, facing growing opposition from the right, left and centre, and an enemy within in the form of its former president Jacob Zuma and his uMkhonto Wesizwe Party. In Part Two of our interview series, ANC elections head Mdumiseni Ntuli reflects frankly on past mistakes and lessons learnt.

The African National Congress (ANC) is heading towards the 2024 elections knowing full well the hurdles ahead, but the party’s elections head Mdumiseni Ntuli says the ANC is ready to engage voters on how it will address those challenges.

Read Part One of our interview series here: ANC made many mistakes, but will correct them in the next five years – elections head 

He was speaking to Daily Maverick as pre-election polls continued to predict that the ANC would lose its majority in the National Assembly for the first time in the 30-year history of democracy, and would lose power outright in two (KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng) of the eight provinces it controls. Polls also suggest that the party will suffer further destruction in the ninth province – the Western Cape – where its archrival, the Democratic Alliance (DA), has been in charge since 2004.

After three decades of winning elections with ease, the ANC has been accused of ever-growing arrogance, with critics saying it has been hijacked by tenderpreneurs and corrupt elements – both within and outside its ranks – who use it to milk the public purse for their own aggrandisement.

The ANC’s mistakes on Jacob Zuma


Ntuli said the ANC made a mistake by supporting former president Jacob Zuma during his appearances in court and before Parliament, thereby elevating an individual’s importance above the party’s – much to the detriment of its own brand.

Early this year, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula told supporters that the ANC lied to protect Zuma on the upgrade to his Nkandla homestead. Ntuli was the ANC KZN provincial secretary when fraud and corruption charges against Zuma were reinstated, and he was one of the leaders who supported him in court and in public.

Read more in Daily Maverick: It was a lie — Mbalula admits ANC tricked Parliament to protect Zuma in Nkandla ‘fire pool’ debacle

Ntuli said there were many things the party had done in the past that it now regretted.

“While one may not take away the good things that were achieved during his tenure as leader of the party and the ANC government. These are his achievements and the ANC’s. But there are many things which are very strange that were done during that era which were never dealt with while JZ was still in the ANC. Some of these were revealed through the commission of inquiries and other investigations. 

“These include the deliberate hollowing out [of] state institutions and state-owned companies. In the case of SARS [South African Revenue Service] and SAA, Eskom and others. 

Former SARS Commissioner Tom Moyane. (Photo by Gallo Images / The Times / Esa Alexander)



“Now there is evidence that Tom Moyane [appointed by Zuma as head of SARS in 2014 until his contract was terminated by President Cyril Ramaphosa in November 2018] and Dudu Myeni [appointed as SAA board chairperson in 2012] and others took conscious and deliberate actions with the aim of walloping and hollowing these state-owned companies … 

dudu myeni Former SAA Chairperson Dudu Myeni. (Photo: Gallo Images / Rapport / Deon Raath)



“These are shocking revelations.

“You and I know that neither Myeni nor Moyane have challenged the findings of the judicial commissions of inquiry that had damning findings against them.”

Zuma and MK Party are ‘counter-revolutionaries’


Ntuli said Zuma had failed in his nine years as president to achieve many of the things that he and the MK Party were now posturing about.

“In a classical political sense, Zuma and the MK Party are counter-revolutionaries. He said he is now against the Constitution that elected him twice as the president, he wants the Constitution to be amended to give more powers to traditional leaders. Powers to do what, I don’t know. 

“When JZ decided to form the MK Party, we knew that he would recruit amongst ANC structures. Indeed, there are people who have left the ANC to join the MK Party for one or the other reasons … We are addressing discontent in our ranks and telling our supporters that you cannot leave your home and abandon your family because you are unhappy about something.

He said Zuma and the MK Party might attract supporters from parties other than the ANC, such as the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the Economic Freedom Front (EFF).

To date, the MK Party has already made an impact among some voters in three by-elections, but Ntuli maintains that the ANC’s internal polling suggests that the ANC will lose only a small portion of its support in KZN to the MK Party.

Cadre deployment and the DA


Cadre deployment has become a burning issue in the election campaign. The ANC embarked on a policy of cadre deployment in 1997, advocating for party loyalists to occupy prominent positions in the public sector.

The Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture found that cadre deployment played a significant part in corruption and went as far as to say that it is “illegal and unconstitutional”.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Cadre deployment – a powerful and lasting bone of rolling political contention

The opposition DA took the ANC to court, seeking that the policy be declared unconstitutional and asking the court to compel the ANC to hand over the minutes of the meetings where cadre deployment was discussed. 

On 12 February 2024, the Constitutional Court ruled that the ANC had five days to hand over their cadre deployment records dating back to 1 January 2013.

The ANC maintains that, in principle, there is nothing wrong with implementing the policy and it will continue with cadre deployment. 

“The judge said there is nothing wrong with a ruling party practising cadre deployment; it is only wrong when people who are not qualified are put into a position for which they have no experience or expertise and others who commit illegal acts and corruption.

“The DA is fighting us in court for practising cadre deployment but they are doing exactly what we do in Western Cape and in municipalities they control. 

“They may not call it cadre deployment, but the DA in [the] Western Cape government also appoints people who it knows will advance their policies,” he said.

“When the DA was accused of applying cadre deployment of their own, Helen Zille issued a statement saying that [former DA leader] Mmusi Maimane had introduced cadre deployment and when [she] came to the leadership of the DA [as leader of the DA Federal Council] she put an end to it. So, now when it is clear that the DA is also practising cadre deployment, this is all blamed on a black man,” Ntuli said, pointing out that this was at a time when “a white DA ideologue” – then federal chairperson James Selfe – was the full-time administrator of the DA.

“This clearly shows the hypocrisy of our opposition. If anything bad goes wrong, a black man is blamed. If a white person is corrupt, this is papered over.

Tackling public service corruption


Ntuli said the perception of widespread corruption in the ANC-run government and in state-owned enterprises worried the ANC, but he disputed that the party was full of corrupt people.

Read more in Daily Maverick: It takes two to tango – Businesses have also been culpable in dishonesty, looting and bringing SA to its knees

“We need to tackle corruption vigorously, wherever it happens. Our cadres who are found committing corruption must face the music. I don’t subscribe to the idea that the ANC as a movement is corrupt. But there are individuals who are corrupt,” he said. 

Ntuli explained that some deployed cadres might feel beholden to certain leaders, “and they commit these acts to help that individual leader”.

“They do it to protect their job or thinking that the individual leader is acting on behalf of the ANC,” he said, adding that it was one fault line in the ANC’s cadre deployment policies.

“But we are now correcting this by capacitating the ANC headquarters to be … an organisation that is able to monitor the people it deploys in various capacities,” he said. DM

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