Key topics:
- ANC reshuffles leaders but keeps them in government roles.
- Internal tensions remain as factions prepare for 2027 leadership race.
- Voter concerns ignored, risking further decline in party support.
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By John Matisonn
The ANC kicks for touch again ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Nearly nine months after the ANC’s humiliating plunge in electoral support, the party has finally announced its long-promised response in the form of a half-baked compromise in its two worst performing provinces, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
For long-suffering residents of Gauteng, the decision means that minimal change is likely to the poor management of the province and the sorely damaged service delivery in Johannesburg and other provincial towns.
Its modest restructuring will leave all ANC leaders in place in their government jobs, but reallocate decision-making powers in the party’s local structures.
The compromise decisions were to keep Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi as premier and KwaZulu-Natal party leader Sboniso Duma as KZN MEC for transport and human settlements, but remove them from control of the party. The decision was designed to placate their party factions while attempting to initiate reform, but it is hard to see how it might bring much-needed change.
The decision appears not to have eased tensions inside the local party organisations, where some members continue to threaten to go court to block it.
Local party officials argued that if the two provincial leaderships deserve punishment for their poor showing, then the national leadership of the party should be punished equally. In the 2024 election, the ANC fell from 54% to 17% in KZN and from 50% to 35% in Gauteng. But the national showing dropped from 57% to 40%, hardly a vote of confidence in the party as a whole.
In reality, the party’s two provincial executives have been disbanded. Lesufi’s position as party chair has been downgraded to “co-convenor” with Amos Masondo, former chairperson of the NCOP and a former Johannesburg mayor. In KZN, long-time ex-cabinet minister Geoff Radebe becomes provincial convenor, downgrading the party chairperson, Duma to “deputy convenor.”
Each province’s party secretary has been removed, and replaced with “coordinators” – former MEC Mike Mabuyakhulu in Gauteng and former MP Hope Papo in KZN.
This unsatisfactory power reshuffle is an attempt to avoid advantaging any faction in the race for president, which will be decided at the ANC congress in 2027. Current frontrunners are thought to include deputy president Paul Mashatile and ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, but at this early stage the factions are far from settled.
This means that the original intention to dissolve the provincial structures in the light of their disastrous performance in last year’s election has been watered down to avoid alienating factions already forming ahead of the 2027 party election for the new president.
It is near impossible to avoid the conclusion that the basic problems that led to the ANC’s dramatic drop in support have not been addressed and it will continue to get worse.
If the ANC is a horse, then nine months gestation of a solution since its disastrous election have produced a camel.
Meanwhile, the political stakes for the country have increased since US President Donald Trump took office. Even at the Gauteng provincial and municipal level, short-term political decisions can jeopardise South Africa’s trade, given that the Gauteng ANC still favours renaming the street where the US consulate-general is located Leila Khaled Street, after a Palestinian involved in two airplane hijackings in which Americans died.
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