Publications
Partners
Oscar van Heerden will participate in two sessions at the Franschhoek Literary Festival.
Session 1, at 09:00 on Friday, 17 May, is the News24 Breakfast at Reuben's Restaurant and Bar, with News24's Adriaan Basson and Qanitaah Hunter (co-authors of Who Will Rule South Africa?) talking to former DA leader Tony Leon and political analyst Oscar van Heerden (Is the Party Over?) about whether SA voters can change the political landscape in this year's election, whether this is the beginning of the end for the ANC and what a coalition nation will look like.
Session 9, titled Continental Drift, will take place in the Council Chambers on Friday, 17 May, at 11:30. Van Heerden looks north with anthropologist Jade Gibson and analyst Adekeye Adebajo (Global Africa: Profiles in Courage, Creativity, and Cruelty) about the fast-moving map of African innovation.
Click here for the full FLF programme.
As an ANC insider, Oscar van Heerden had a ringside seat at the ANC elective conference at Nasrec in 2022. In his new book, Is the Party Over?, he presents a gripping account of how political power changed hands and what was at stake as Cyril Ramaphosa battled to consolidate his power. In this powerful account of the inner workings of a cripplingly divided political party, he himself is part of the story, contending with his own disappointment at what has become of the party of liberation.
In this excerpt, Van Heerden, one of South Africa's foremost political analysts, describes the marginalisation of disgraced former Free State premier Ace Magashule.
BOOK: Is the Party Over? by Oscar van Heerden (Jacana)
From the moment he was suspended from the ANC in May 2021 after refusing to step aside over corruption charges, former party secretary general Ace Magashule declared publicly, and not without hubris, that his ambition was to step back into the party and its national leadership. He would often gleefully declare from that point onward that he remained a loyal cadre of the ANC. It was a desperate effort to rally support and prise open the door to the ANC NEC. Now he began to think about new horizons.
It was a sunny Friday morning, the first day of registration at the Nasrec Expo Centre, and Magashule cut a lonely figure outside the conference perimeters. As I walked towards the entrance to the venue, I passed a knot of reporters who were already badgering him about whether he wanted to be nominated from the conference floor for president, to which he declared pointedly that he might have been exiled from the party's inner sanctums, but he "was around" and electable.
He was imploring passing delegates to fight his suspension so that he could be part of the conference. Later that day the media ran the story with a picture of Magashule. It portrayed the man, in a bit of showmanship, brandishing a sign on the concrete floor outside Nasrec, emblematic of a large name tag, saying, "I'm here."
It was a daring thought, but there was just one problem. Unlike the 54th conference at Nasrec, when RET delegates could claim a strong presence, Magashule was outside the party, along with members of the RET faction, looking in. His rise and fall is not just a story about his own ambitions and blatant mixture of power and money.
Since the Zuma presidency, state capture had become a clannish system of looting. It was giving birth to ethnic elites that were in fact factions tied to state assets, often allied to powerful party and government leaders in the RET faction. Next to Jacob Zuma, Magashule had become the most senior emblem of this cancer in the ANC.
No sooner had Zuma's been ousted from the NEC and presidency than the RET faction began angling for a return to power. Just two years earlier, in June 2021, Zuma's acolytes in the RET had staged a violent showdown in what looked like an orchestrated campaign of looting and sabotage across the country. Much of this has been well documented and does not merit attention here.
Now, at the 55th elective conference, they were exiled from the centre of power, without a voice and restless. I knew that they were not going to go down without one last stand and was appalled at Magashule's showmanship. It didn't matter. On that day, I knew the real battle would be inside the perimeters of Nasrec, not outside.
It was a tense day for the Ramaphosa camp. In the desultory buildup to the first day, there was talk of candidates attempting to bribe their way to power, hints of delegates using the election process as a battleground for their comeback. And so it was with a heavy heart that I shared the anxiety of some of my comrades in the Ramaphosa camp that the electoral process was likely to become a last-ditch tool to disrupt, and maybe even shut down, the conference as their strategic gambit to pre-empt Ramaphosa's election and mobilise popular support.
I was reminded at this point of one of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s interviews with a newspaper ahead of his re-election in the early 1990s: “When a rival loses support and confidence … you must expect that he will attempt to stir up things," Yeltsin said.
Would the same thing happen at Nasrec? It was a worrying prospect, but one that had begun to take shape over the preceding months. There were already rumours of failed attempts to influence branch and provincial elections through pay-offs and other hidden campaign activities. My own impressions were reinforced by the details I already knew, as a participant in all party conferences since 1996, of electoral manipulations in branches and provinces since Thabo Mbeki's removal at Polokwane in 2007. The details, of course, were always secret, hidden in car boots full of black bags and brown paper envelopes exchanging hands in parking lots.
It may always be difficult to control the exchange of money, but we should not ignore the importance of branches in the leadership election process. Because of their enormous influence over electoral outcomes, branches have been the real loci of power in the ANC, the centres of grassroots articulations of policy and national leadership choices. Thus, branches earn their legitimacy in the ANC from their power to choose their national leadership candidates; a power based on rigorous discussion of policy matters and resolutions.
READ | REVIEW: Adriaan Basson and Qaanitah Hunter probe political landscape in Who Will Rule South Africa?
In theory, it is a robust process, not just, as is generally assumed, a headlong battle for power. When branches eventually conclude their discussions, their choice of candidates, elected by a majority vote of 50 plus one per cent, ought to be the outcome of a careful assessment of who is best placed to champion the ANC’s policies for the next five years.
In its original formulation, branch resolutions were taken to the national conference by delegates whose numbers were proportionate to the size of the branch. Thus, for every 100 members who constitute a basic branch of the ANC, that branch was entitled to one delegate to the conference. If a branch had 3 000 members, it was technically entitled to 30 members at the conference.
But over the years the ANC has sought to counterbalance over-representation because of the size of certain branches within the provinces and, more recently, their correspondence to factional interests, by coming up with an equitable formula. In this formula, large branches are entitled to a fixed number of delegates.
By the time of the 55th conference, it was widely believed that the Ramaphosa slate held the balance of power in branch and provincial structures of the party. But Ramaphosa’s RET opponents had other plans. Their expectations of disrupting the conference, and perhaps shutting it down, were high. But the boldness of this plan had not been fully fathomed by Ramaphosa supporters who had expected a reasonably smooth day.
Inside the perimeters of conference, a little understood gambit was a provision in the ANC's rulebook that allowed delegates to contest from the floor of conference, notwithstanding their own branch resolutions on candidates. It was a glaring loophole, but one that gave delegates every opportunity to vote after their heart’s desire at the conference itself. It was a symbol of the ANC's rich culture of democracy.
