Analysis: The man who would be king — never, ever bet against Paul Mashatile

Mashatile has not endorsed either Ramaphosa or rival Zweli Mkhize for the ANC presidency, and has said several times while campaigning over the past few months that if he were to be nominated for the top spot from the conference floor, he would assent. (Photo: Gallo Images / Fani Mahuntsi)

By Rebecca Davis

7 Dec 2022

Amid the confusion, anger and anxiety caused by the Phala Phala saga, there is someone who is likely to emerge politically strengthened. Paul Mashatile is a strong bet for deputy president and for the country’s next president. The only question up in the air may be when, exactly, he takes South Africa’s reins.

This piece was first published in Daily Maverick ahead of the ANC elective conference in December.

David “DD” Mabuza’s recent history is a cautionary tale for those who lust after the top job in the ANC.

Five years ago, at the ANC’s elective conference, Mabuza’s emergence as deputy president was greeted as very bad news in many circles. In terms of ANC custom, it was pointed out, this automatically put Mabuza in pole position to be Cyril Ramaphosa’s successor. South Africa should brace itself for President Mabuza.

Yet, just days away from the ANC’s next conference, Mabuza is a spent force. In political terms, he is dead in the water — weakened by mysteriously recurring illness, persistent rumours of massive corruption, and his removal from the provincial politics in which he amassed his fiefdom.

mashatile popularity Paul Mashatile is the only ANC politician currently who can give Ramaphosa a run for his money in terms of popularity. (Photo: Gallo Images / Luba Lesolle)

A lot can happen in five years. Which is why, if you’re a shrewd political operator, you’re a lot better off shadowing a sitting South African president in his second term, rather than his first. Especially if that president may end up not finishing his second term.

Paul Mashatile is an extremely shrewd political operator.

How the ‘Holy Trinity’ built his base

It is a depressing reflection of the current ANC leadership that the candidacy of Paul Mashatile, at 60 years old, represents one of the more youthful Top Six options.

But Mashatile also seems younger than his years in some ways. Perhaps it is the fact that he has yet to develop the generous belly of most male South African politicians who have passed middle age. Perhaps it is because he is associated most strongly with a group of forever young bucks: the activists who cut their teeth in Alexandra township in Johannesburg in the late 1970s and ’80s, many of whom have gone on to influential positions in commerce and Gauteng politics.

“They are fiercely independent rebels,” Matuma Letsoalo wrote of this group in 2014.

“Some call them — without evidence — reckless adventurists, a corrupt mafia whose common drive is to pillage the rich province’s resources. Their firm grip on Gauteng, the economic and political dynamo of the country, has indirectly turned them into a quasi-independent body of the ANC. Their impudent, cheeky streak is legendary.”

The core of these ride-or-die comrades was dubbed the “Alex mafia” fairly early in their careers. Key members: Mashatile, Mike Maile, Nkenke Kekana and Bridgman Sithole. It is not a label Mashatile appreciates today, since it reflected the perception that Mashatile and his fellow politicians awarded plum Gauteng contracts to their old Alex buddies.

But fortunately for him, there are other nicknames aplenty around Mashatile currently: usually the sign of a politician who can rely on widespread popular support.

His detractors have dubbed him the “Holy Trinity”, for the ludicrous fact that he holds three of the ANC’s Top Six positions — due to the suspension of Secretary-General Ace Magashule and the death of Deputy Secretary-General Jessie Duarte. His supporters call themselves the “Adiweles”, a reference to a popular Amapiano track which eulogises underdogs and upstarts.

mashatile mkhize ramaposa Mashatile has not endorsed either Ramaphosa or rival Zweli Mkhize for the ANC presidency, and has said several times while campaigning over the past few months that if he were to be nominated for the top spot from the conference floor, he would assent. (Photo: Gallo Images / Fani Mahuntsi)

At this stage of his career, however, Mashatile is anything but. Over the decades he has held a remarkable variety of political jobs: spokesperson for the South African Communist Party, Gauteng elections manager for the ANC, Gauteng premier, deputy minister of arts and culture (an ANC version of political Siberia), then minister of arts and culture, MEC for finance, for housing, for public transport and roads… up to the roles he holds today in the Top Six.

Although Gauteng is regarded as Mashatile’s primary political playground, this wide experience has given him access to a much broader constituency than most politicians.

Mashatile is the only ANC office-holder currently who can give Ramaphosa a run for his money in terms of popularity within the party. At Nasrec in 2017, he won the second-highest number of delegate votes — behind only Mabuza, in what would be the high point of DD’s political life, and ahead of Ramaphosa.

To date, he has easily commandeered the lion’s share of pre-conference nominations, with 1,791 ANC branches endorsing him for the role of deputy president.

There are those who reckon, in fact, that after the recent Phala Phala chaos, Mashatile would have a pretty good shot at the ANC presidency, leapfrogging the deputy position altogether. But Mashatile is not competing for the presidency at this time. Or is he?

Who is Paul Mashatile?

Speak to anyone who knows Mashatile, and critics and supporters alike agree on one thing: the dude is exceptionally likeable. (Then again, so was JZ.)

Other words that recur in descriptions of Mashatile: laid-back and soft-spoken.

“I don’t recall ever seeing him flustered; he never shows anger,” a senior ANC figure told Daily Maverick this week.

Late ANC veteran Ben Turok previously wrote of him as “decent and kindly”. When former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein first encountered Mashatile, he struck Feinstein as “quiet, shy, studious, smart and humble”.

“Humble” is also Mashatile’s reputation among the ANC branches. But those who know him well say he has a soft spot for the finer things in life — as was scandalously revealed in 2006 when he reportedly charged a R96,375 lunch at a fancy Sandton restaurant to the Gauteng taxpayer.

“He will never be the loudest voice in the room. That’s not his style,” another ANC insider told Daily Maverick.

“But to underestimate Mashatile will be your downfall. He is a master tactician.”

For a man who has been a fixture in SA politics for so long, it is surprisingly difficult to pin down Mashatile in terms of his personal political beliefs. Perhaps this ambiguity is what has allowed him to win respect across the “broad church” of the ANC, from Gauteng’s metropolitan elites to KwaZulu-Natal’s “Taliban” faction.

He is also the ANC figure with whom the EFF’s Julius Malema said he would be most able to work, in a News24 interview in August. Whether anything should be read into this is questionable: Malema is Machiavellian enough to have named Mashatile in this way precisely in order to hobble the ANC man’s chances in certain circles.

Over the years, Mashatile has mostly been a reliable mouthpiece for official ANC policies, with two notable exceptions: his outspoken opposition to that most vexed of Gauteng issues, e-tolling; and his vocal calls for former president Jacob Zuma to step down before that stance was widespread within the ANC.

Mashatile’s reason for opposing e-tolls was interesting, and perhaps telling — for a man sometimes described as frustrated by the limitations on his powers within the ANC.

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His resistance to e-tolling was premised on the grounds that Sanral, the roads agency, was trying to usurp the government’s power.

“Government agencies don’t run the country, but the ANC does. I don’t like government agencies that take on politicians,” Mashatile told the Gauteng ANC in 2014.

When it came to Zuma, Mashatile was steadfast and consistent, having lobbied for Zuma’s Mangaung rival Kgalema Motlanthe to win the presidency in JZ’s place. Mashatile has also held firm on the necessity of the “step-aside” rule for ANC politicians not just charged with corruption, but also for those who have been found by the party’s Integrity Commission to have brought the ANC into disrepute.

A strict anti-corruption stance has, in fact, become Mashatile’s major political calling card of late. It’s a position his sceptics find hard to swallow, given previous events to be explored down this page.

In general terms, the ideological impression Mashatile has given in recent years has been that of a moderate centrist.

In 2018 he reassured the genteel Cape Town Press Club on the subject of land, saying ANC land grabs were out of the question. A year previously, he said “white monopoly capital” was a term favoured by populists which did not exist in the ANC’s vocabulary. Mashatile has also argued that measures like nationalising the Reserve Bank are unimportant compared to service delivery.

“He’s not politically or economically reckless,” Daily Maverick was told this week by a National Executive Committee member who is backing a different candidate for the deputy president position.

“He is mature and sober-minded. He does not pose a policy risk.”

The C-word trailing Mashatile

There is one major drawback to Mashatile as a candidate which is spoken about surprisingly little these days: until at least 2010, the stench of corruption appeared to envelop him.

One of the earliest corruption allegations involving Mashatile dates back to June 1997, when he was Gauteng transport MEC. As per reporting in The Star from the period, Mashatile took an advance of R34,000 for a study trip to Australia, but never went. He did start paying the money back, in 1999, but the Democratic Party at the time noted that this amounted to: “in effect, a two-year interest-free loan from Gauteng’s taxpayers”.

To record every corruption incident in which Mashatile was fingered in Gauteng over the next decade would take some space.

While serving as provincial finance MEC in 2007, two relatives — his daughter and his nephew — allegedly reaped benefits from relationships with government contractors.

amaBhungane journalists reported extensively on Mashatile’s alleged involvement in corruption around big contracts with Gauteng’s economic development agencies: the source of the original “Alex mafia” tag.

Although Mashatile has not been publicly linked to corruption scandals for many years now, many are dubious about his more recent marketing as someone in the vanguard of anti-corruption reform within the ANC.

How long is Mashatile’s game really?

For the past few months, rumours have been building that Mashatile is positioning himself to take over from Ramaphosa long before the 2024 general elections.

In November, a Standard Bank memo to investors noted that Mashatile appeared to be launching a “stealthy” bid for the presidency.

It stated that Mashatile has been “quietly lobbying key constituencies, including business, in recent months, arguing that he would be a more decisive leader than President Ramaphosa has been”.

That this lobbying has borne fruit can be seen in a flurry of recent positive press centred on Mashatile. Bloomberg described him as a “can-do, investor-friendly politician”, in an article with a headline that advertised Mashatile as having “a plan to fix South Africa’s struggling economy”.

Mashatile has not endorsed either Ramaphosa or rival Zweli Mkhize for the ANC presidency, and has said several times while campaigning over the past few months that if he were to be nominated for the top spot from the conference floor, he would assent.

Daily Maverick’s Stephen Grootes has explained how improbable such a scenario would be, as it would require a show of hands of 25% of ANC delegates at the policy conference.

But if anyone could pull off the secret manoeuvring such a move would require, it would be a person with the keys to the ANC engine room, and access to branches across the country. Never bet against Mashatile. DM

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South Africa

How the ‘Holy Trinity’ built his base

Who is Paul Mashatile?

The C-word trailing Mashatile

How long is Mashatile’s game really?