There is magical thinking in polite South African society that ANC Secretary-General Ace Magashule’s political demise is imminent. In the real world, Ace is in the strongest position to wield the final, killing blow. He is perhaps the greatest threat democratic South Africa has ever faced.
First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
If you’re the gambling type, where do you place your bets?
On President Cyril Ramaphosa, the staid, plodding, committee-obsessed, consensus-forward technocrat? On the legal system, bound as it is by the constraints imposed by rule of law and mauled by the Years of Zuma? Or on Ace Magashule, former warlord of the Free State, current secretary-general of the ANC, de facto leader of the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) movement, and a man with a current tally of 21 charges of corruption and fraud hanging over his head?
As the roulette wheel spins into oblivion, the outcome will be determined by the following zero-sum logic: if Ace loses, he and his supporters will be locked out of patronage networks, their families disgraced and likely impoverished, their links to the ANC’s power brokers severed. Ace himself, and many more, will serve a considerable sentence, and will be too old to emerge from prison as a warrior waging righteous warfare against White Monopoly Capital.
If Ace loses, he loses everything.
But what happens if Ace wins?
Well, if he wins, and if he’s able to wrest control of the ANC from Ramaphosa’s disparate and harried faction, he wins it all.
Mainstream media practitioners and high-end commentators are mostly unwilling to consider such an outcome. It’s hard to blame them. But over the course of the past several weeks, beginning with former president Jacob Zuma’s nose-thumbing at his constitutional obligation to appear before the Zondo Commission, the forces against the Ramaphosa presidency have 3D printed themselves into a remarkably coherent mob. The Economic Freedom Fighters’ Julius Malema, who moonlights as kingmaker within the ANC, paid a visit of support to Zuma at his Nkandla residence, travelling by helicopter to engage in the sort of DF Malanesque bosberaad that most South Africans probably thought went out of fashion with apartheid.
We now know, without question, that the Radical Economic Transformers have assembled an expeditious bloc of slavering loot-monsters. And that their surest passage to survival/victory depends on the secretary-general taking up residence in Mahlamba Ndlopfu.
They’re so close they can taste the breath mints in the presidential courtesy bowl.
Click here to read the full article
Comments
Post a Comment