VOICES
One of the challenges of being the president of the ANC and the country simultaneously is that the demands of the latter take you away from most of the party’s political work. Depending on the type of ANC secretary-general you have, you may find yourself losing your grip and influence on the party you were elected to lead.
Because the job of the secretary-general is to, on a full-time basis, administer and oversee every aspect of the organisation – from branches to caucuses – the person in that position can therefore make or break a president.
A secretary-general must be the “political hand” of the president and be able to advocate his vision and run the organisation in a manner that fulfils the articulated mission of the president.
The president must be able to count on that person who should be fanatically in his corner and ready to protect the political space on his behalf.
Fikile Mbalula has been the ANC secretary-general for party president Cyril Ramaphosa.
PARTY ENFORCER
Ramaphosa required not only a diligent worker and a person with determination to accomplish tasks but also a fiercely loyal secretary-general who was uncompromising in advocating the president’s expressed wishes.
In Mbalula, Ramaphosa got just that.
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What the president needed was a party enforcer to keep all the ANC structures in line, ensure that all branches, regions and provinces sang from the president’s hymnbook, and watch that no undercurrent forces operated inside the ANC, especially within the ground forces against the vision of the president.
In Mbalula, the president got that enforcer. Mbalula understood his enforcer role immediately and this was clear when he addressed his first press conference after his election in 2022.
Mbalula said:
I said in some of my political lectures that the secretary-general ngumatshingilani [is a security guard].
“I am matshingilani. That’s my work. There’s nothing about the ANC that can happen without me … If a member of the ANC is promoting anarchy and doing their fighting somewhere, I must be responsive to that.
“But I work through the structures and those structures must be effective and must do their job. Anyone who is sleeping on the job is going to have a problem with me.”
RAMAPHOSA AND MBALULA: A DREAM DUO
There was justifiable criticism of the Ramaphosa lobby group for rallying behind Mbalula as their secretary-general over and against other more capable contenders for the office.
There was also a sense that Mbalula’s limitations and blind spots were well known and he was prone to making gaffes that might overshadow the message of the organisation.
This was a fair judgement and one cannot say Mbalula has not done just that.
In fact, in his first year in office, Mbalula’s trend was to make off-hand remarks that were not thought-through, which he later corrected. But they were a source of embarrassment for the organisation, given the league of extraordinary men who had held the office before him.
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The scepticism, however, had to be matched with the truth that, in all the work Mbalula had done – in politics and in government – he always brought unmatched levels of energy, enthusiasm and hard work.
This was exactly what the ANC needed after Mbalula’s predecessor, who ran the party through self-appointed interim structures and seemed incapable of taking any structure to the conferences.
While Ramaphosa had the unenviable task of rebuilding the state institutions destroyed by state capture and graft, he could count on Mbalula to do the same with the ANC, and the new secretary-general delivered like a fanatic on the mission of his life.
Back-to-back, he took every structure of the ANC to the conferences so that these structures could restore the party’s credibility and govern themselves.
What Ramaphosa was doing in government, Mbalula was replicating in the ANC; a dream duo that had not been seen in a while. Mbalula and Ramaphosa took over the ANC at such a consequential time when the organisation seemed to be coming apart at the seams. It was split by ideology, corruption, sins of incumbency and political gate-keeping, among other weaknesses.
It’s safe to say nothing has been accomplished without the grit and passionate attitude of Mbalula towards his responsibilities. What has emerged is a story of a secretary-general, sometimes loose with his tongue and prone to putting his foot in his mouth, but a man who has stabilised the ANC and rallied the organisation behind its president and his message.
The ANC Youth League went to the conference after years of nadir and the provinces, such as the Western Cape, that had been moving from one interim structure to the next also went to the conference.
The women’s and veterans’ leagues and every other ANC structure that had no legitimate elected leadership for years are now fully functional with legitimate leaders chosen by the ANC members. All this has happened under the guidance and drive of Mbalula.
SECRETARY IN THE GNU ERA
The ANC has been fortunate to have the best secretary-generals over the years, who have served their presidents and the organisation with loyalty and honour.
Sol Plaatje; Selope Thema; James Calata; Walter Sisulu; the longest serving secretary-general under the presidency of Oliver Tambo, Alfred Nzo; and the more recent secretaries Kgalema Motlanthe and Gwede Mantashe, among others, were all fiercely protective of their presidents and loyal to the organisation.
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It was the first time in the organisation’s history that we saw Ace Magashule, as secretary-general, declare in his speech after being elected, a desire to see his president removed from office. While the ANC presidents and secretaries have always been united, at a provincial level, chairpersons and their secretaries have somehow always been divided.
As a result, they end up pulling in different directions, with the secretaries biding their time until the chairperson makes a mistake and they engineer a soft coup.
This may explain Magashule’s attitude coming from his position of chairperson of the ANC in the Free State and bringing that divisive attitude between him and the president after he was elected secretary-general.
He was never going to succeed because such a tendency is foreign to the ANC national leadership.
Mbalula, however, has followed the old tradition of being a political protector of his president against enemies outside and inside the organisation.
Were it not for Mbalula being the secretary-general instead of Magashule, the devastating loss of the ANC in the 29 May elections, by a whopping 17%, would have led to a secretary-general engineering a soft coup to replace the party president.
One may argue that, while the ANC lost the polls in such a dramatic way, the organisation has purified its political environment and rid itself of its divisive and factional elements for the first time in a long time.
It might rise again as one, free of Jacob Zuma, Magashule, the radical economic transformation gang and other offshoots that have wanted to hijack the ANC for their nefarious intentions.
Rule 4.16 of the ANC constitution beseeches all its members to “defend the unity and integrity of the organisation and its principles and combat any tendency towards disruption and factionalism”.
That responsibility does not only lie with the secretary-general; all the ANC members must protect the organisation and defend its decisions.
- Diko is an ANC member and former spokesperson for the human settlements department
Original Article Link: https://www.news24.com/citypress/voices/yonela-diko-fikile-mbalula-the-bombastic-and-unfiltered-sg-ramaphosa-needed-20240922