Ramaphosa’s Announcement of ANC Leadership Ticket Riles Backers

JOPHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) Leaders of the ruling African National Congress in South Africa’s richest province said they oppose Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa’s decision to announce a ticket of running mates in his bid to become the ANC’s next president, saying it has the potential to deepen divisions in the party.

While ANC leaders in Gauteng province back Ramaphosa to replace President Jacob Zuma as ANC leader, they don’t support his announcement on Sunday of a proposed list of senior party officials for leadership positions in the organization. Among the politicians on the ticket was the surprise choice of Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor for deputy president.

“We do not support a winner-takes-all approach,” Nkenke Kekana, the ANC spokesman in Gauteng, said by phone. “We are for a united leadership” and would prefer that the six leadership posts, which include chairman and secretary general, aren’t put forward as a group, he said.

Gauteng will take the fifth-biggest delegation to the ANC conference in December that will choose the party’s next leader. The race is widely seen as a head-to-head contest between Ramaphosa and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the president’s ex wife and former chairwoman of the African Union Commission. Gauteng will have 508 delegates from a total of 4,723 branch representative approved to be at the event, according to a list circulated Oct. 6 by ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe.

“It is indeed unprecedented that someone announces the slate before conference, but also I think this is the most resolute action by the deputy president,” Ralph Mathekga, an independent political, said by phone. “There are certain risks, of course, because the people he didn’t include in his slate, whatever they do in campaigning, they are now his enemies.”

Ramaphosa seems to have an early lead over Dlamini-Zuma as branch nominations trickle in, according to the South African Institute of Race Relations. Human Settlements Minister Lindiwe Sisulu and the party’s Treasurer-General Zweli Mkhize have also declared their intention to vie for the top spot.

Read more on early results from the ANC’s branch nominations

The slate announcement drew criticism from his ANC colleagues, including Mantashe, who on Monday said that such declarations “seek to usurp the entrenched right of the branches to nominate candidates of their choosing.” The party banned such slates in 2015 and designated the branch “as the basic unit of the ANC,” he said in a statement.

Ramaphosa responded by saying his view on who should take up the leadership posts was “by no means prescriptive and no not displace the right of branches to nominate their preferred candidates.”

His team also includes Senzo Mchunu, the former premier of the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal for secretary-general, and Gauteng party chairman Paul Mashatile as treasurer-general, with Mantashe moving to the position of national party chairman.

Ramaphosa’s decision to announce his running mates was probably a calculated risk to embolden his campaign, according to Daryl Glaser, a politics professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Ramaphosa’s announcement “potentially does alienate some people, but also forestalls some sort of competition,” Glaser said. “It does look like a bit of a risk — you would have thought he might have wanted to keep his options open and to keep everybody on his side, at least anyone who has a plausible chance of being in his government.”

Source: Bloomberg Business News