Other than the ANC President Jacob Zuma himself, there is hardly any other major ANC leader since the ANC Polokwane conference in 2007, who has suffered as much vitriol, open scorn and sharp dislike like Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary general. As recently as 14 January 2013, the Star Africa Edition carried an article by Tyrone August entitled "The ANC is displaying all the symptoms of advanced age." The byline to the article was "Ruling party not the organisation it once was."

In his article Tyrone wrote that it is "...quite natural that the organisation was beginning to show some of the usual signs of old age: an increasingly selective memory, occasional gaps in logic, and a growing tendency to reminisce about the past." Tyrone goes further and makes the truly startling assertion that he believes all these characteristics are best epitomised by Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary general. Most remarkably, he goes much further and christens Mantashe "The bearded."

[So the 'ANC goatee or Imbuzi' (Kgalema Motlanthe) is down, long live 'The bearded' (Gwede Mantashe)! You would be excused if you are tempted to ask whether the beard and goatee have ever played such central role in SA politics since the time of the legendary Afrikaner leader, Paul Kruger.]

Just before the Mangaung conference last year, Mantashe was involved in a hell-raising altercation with a group of church leaders, led by Anglican Bishop Mokgoba, over a public letter the men of the collar had written to the ANC. In the letter, the clerics raised concerns about the moral decline among ANC leaders. As reported in 'Parable Online', under the heading "Mantashe warns clerics to back off", Mantashe is said to have implied that the clerics were a 'vitriolic' and 'mischievous' social group' and akin to "a dog" that "comes out to bite you." He accused the clerics of wanting to influence the delegates to the Mangaung conference so as to ensure a particular outcome favourable to them. A fuming Bishop Makgoba retorted on SABC evening news by saying that he was not "going to be told what to say by Mantashe."

In part one of this article I showed the shocking level of low esteem in which Zackie Achmat, the leader of Treatment Action Council (TAC) holds Mantashe.

Few years ago when Mantashe accused COSATU of harbouring clandestine ambitions to install a Zimbabwe-type Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in South Africa through "regime change", a livid Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of COSATU, retorted by basically accusing the ANC (read Gwede Mantashe) of being "paranoid".

In point of fact, the post-Polokwane ANC leadership succession battles, which culminated at the ANC Mangaung conference last December, were effectively started by the extra-ordinary attack on Mantashe by the then ANCYL leader, Julius Malema. Following the latter's booing (as part of an ANC delegation that included Billy Masetlha, Tony Yengeni and Tokyo Sexwale) at the 14 December 2009 SACP special conference in Polokwane, Limpopo province. Malema basically accused Gwede Mantashe, who doubled as SACP chairman, of failing to protect the ANC delegation to that SACP conference from booing by his fellow communists because, Malema alleged, Mantashe was conflicted by wearing two hats as ANC SG and SACP chairman. Malema further called on Mantashe to step down from his elected ANC position or face being recalled.

NUMSA, SA's second biggest union, reacted furiously to Malema and the ANCYL's attacks on Mantashe, saying in its statement that "the ANC is not run by tsotsis who sit in shebeens and decide to put their friends as leaders" ('Zuma should have defended Mantashe', NUMSA, Business Report, 18 February 2010). Irvin Jim, NUMSA's general secretary, intimated that Mantashe was being targeted and "eaten alive" because he was "a communist".

Less than a month later, the African News of 06 March 2010 reported that Vavi had slammed ANC President Jacob Zuma hard for not defending Mantashe from attacks by Julius Malema.

The carefully orchestrated, politically savvy and deeply strategic mobilisation of support by COSATU, its affiliated unions, as well as the SACP, in support of Gwede Mantashe and against Julius Malema, reached its deafening crescendo in June 2011. All gloves were taken off and the anti-Malema and pro-Mantashe coalition went for the jugular. The following quote from The Times SA of. 13 June 2011, by. Sipho Masondo and Nkululeko Ncana, entitled "ANC partners turn up heat on Malema" and with the byline "Dangerous populist demagogy costing us dearly', could also have been billed "Public Square Show to 'expose' and ideologically lynch Julius Malema before his unofficial political burial." In their report, Sipho Masondo and Nkululeko Ncana wrote:

"Speaking in Johannesburg after the party's central committee meeting, Nzimande, without mentioning anyone by name, said: 'This demagogy constitutes the greatest threat, not just to our electoral performance, but also to our hard-won democratic achievements." They further reported that "Nzimande's attack follows a report in the Sunday Times yesterday that Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the trade union federation COSATU, warned that South Africa could become a 'banana republic' if, the youth league among others, succeed in getting rid of President Jacob Zuma and ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe. Both COSATU and the SACP believe that the league wants to remove Zuma and Mantashe at the party's elective conference in Mangaung in the Free State, next year."

[A cartoon by Zapiro around the same time, in reaction to Vavi alleging that the ANCYL wants to turn SA into 'a banana republic', remains one of his most original and creatively hilarious. It shows 'banana' Julius Malema half peeled, addressing his fellow 'banana' ANCYL leaders, half peeled too, and sitting on chairs behind a table on a stage. They effectively had succeeded to turn themselves into 'banana' leaders first, according to this Zapiro cartoon, even before attaining their Vavi-alleged dream of 'a banana republic' in SA. Just classic caricature.]

Thus the ANC battle for Mangaung started in earnest in December 2009 at the special conference of the SACP in Polokwane and culminated in Mangaung in December 2012.

Why has so such political fire-power been directed at and concentrated on Mantashe for so long, turning him into a veritable pet-hate for some? And why did NUMSA, COSATU and its big affiliates, and the SACP rise as one man in a rear-guard defence of Gwede Mantashe? Was it just because Mantashe is a former trade union leader of NUM and was at the time the chairman of the SACP? Was it Mantashe the man, the Tripartite Alliance politician and leader, who was being defended? Or was it the all-important office of the ANC secretary general that Mantashe occupies that was being defended or attacked? Or was it both, jointly so?

In his exclusive Business Day interview with Sam Mkokeli (Ibid), Mantashe gave a clue, in a self-deprecating way, in terms of what his own understanding was of what drove and motivated some of the vicious and sustained attacks directed at him as ANC secretary general. In this regard Mantashe stated that:

"I always used the metaphor that I was just the post box - from the outset the target was Jacob Zuma and not me. I am too small a fish to be targeted."

A more compelling reason for the attacks on Mantashe was provided by Jacob Dlamini, the Business Day columnist, in his article of 1 April 2010, entitled "Youth agencies abound - and demand to be fed." Dlamini wrote:

"You control the office of the secretary general, you control the engine room of the ANC. This is the office that handles membership lists, is responsible for "deployment" and the overall health of the organisation. It is the most important position in the ANC, more important than the position of president even."

Yet another plausible reason proposed for attacks on Mantashe was provided by a writer under the pen-name "Downsideforsure", in News24 article of 21 December 2012. In this writer's opinion:

"Mantashe had hardly been the General Secretary (sic) for two years before his credentials were questioned by the youth league, and Mbalula suggested as a replacement. Assertions were made to the effect that Mantashe does not come from the ranks of the ANC and should not be SG. Furthermore the league and Mbalula's utterances questioned the roles of the SACP and COSATU in Zuma's victory at Polokwane...They were also acts of sabotage in that they were an attempt to make it uncomfortable for Mantashe to carry out the ANC mandate." (News24, "Kgalema Motlanthe got his due").

In one of the opening paragraphs of part one of this article, I quoted ANC President Zuma as saying that "...the utterances that are made about (Mantashe) do not only impact on the person of the secretary general, but on the dignity and integrity of the ANC. An attack on (Mantashe) hits at the belly of the ANC." (Sunday Independent, 21 March 2010).

So bitter and divisive had become the pre-Mangaung ANC leadership succession battles that by 15 June 2012 Rapule Tabane of Mail & Guardian was able to report on a heated exchanges and deep divisions within the ANC's highest decision-making body between conferences, namely the national executive committee (NEC), in which ANC President Jacob Zuma himself, a close ally of Mantashe, was reportedly called "a dictator" by some of the anti-Mantashe ANC NEC forces.

But if the office of the ANC secretary general and its incumbent are really that all-powerful, as alleged above, why didn't this fact alone protect the long-serving former ANC secretary general, Alfred Nzo, from defeat by the ANC 'Young Turk' Cyril Ramaphosa, an ANC leadership outsider, at the ANC's Durban elective conference in 1991? And why didn't this fact later protect Cyril Ramaphosa himself from political humiliation at the hands of former ANC deputy president, Thabo Mbeki, during the two's bitter power struggle to succeed Nelson Mandela in the 1990s? And, historically, why did this fact not assist Rev James Calata, Mantashe's self-professed role-model, together with the former ANC President Dr Xuma, from political defeat and humiliation at the hands of the newly-formed and resurgent ANC 'Young Lions' of the 1940s led by Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Joe Matthews, Anton Lembede and others?

I think something deeper and more fundamental is at play here, which we need to grasp to understand the nature and purpose of ANC and SA politics in the post-Mandela era.

I believe the start of such an understanding of why the office of the ANC secretary general under Gwede Mantashe became so hugely contested, is in again reverting to the concepts of Hannah Arendt regarding the differences between "power", "authority", and "force."

According to Arendt's literature, "force" operates in the natural realm of things, such as the force of a tsunami. These are nature's moments beyond the control or mastery of man over them. Man can only try to harness this "force" of nature for his own good.

In contrast, Arendt's understanding of "power" is that it speaks to how human have organised their relations (human relations), especially as reflecting their hierarchies. In this understanding of power, people organise themselves, as only humans can, for the sole purpose of a concerted action intended to achieve a definite outcome of persuading their fellow human beings, or alternatively cajoling and coercing them, for a definite, defined purpose. In this sense, Karl Marx once made the important point that though a bee may shame our most talented artist in how it weaves its honey-comb, the key difference between a bee and an artist is that the artist first has an idea in his mind before weaving his artistic magic on the canvass. It is a crucial difference in distinction that also speaks to what sets "power" as organised by humans in their relationship, apart from the blind, uncontrollable "force" in nature.

Arendt then distinguished "power" from "authority." "Authority" is "power" in a specific sense of the "power" that vests in humans due to the office they occupy, the skills set they possess and society's demand for such a skills set and accompanying competencies. The possession of the skills set and competencies confers the 'knowledge' authority on the person, which is buttressed by the willingness of other human beings to accord admiration, high status, adulation, respect and veneration, as well as credibility, trustworthiness, and most crucially, legitimacy, on the person in or conferred "authority."

From this helpful framework of Hannah Arendt, it is clear that the "power" of the ANC secretary general, in this particular instance Gwede Mantashe, derives from the ANC Constitution and subsequent decisions and resolutions of ANC high decision-making bodies like its national conferences and national executive committee (NEC).

This is the same power all ANC SGs, not just Mantashe, enjoyed, enjoy and will enjoy in the future. But, I submit, the "authority" of the ANC secretary general, and any Top Six office-bearer for that matter, is a different kettle of fish. Such "authority" is first and foremost the function of internal ANC politics at a given moment, the balance of contending forces inside the ANC and the imperatives of a particular juncture in the broader SA or international climate the ANC may find itself at any given moment.

In this sense the "power" of an ANC top office is fixed and clearly stipulated. But how effective that "power" is, depends on the "authority" of the ANC office and its incumbent. What complicates the interaction and relationship between "power" and "authority" is that the variables underpinning "authority" are very dynamic and forever shifting, like dune formations in the Kalahari Desert.

"Power" is the shrubs in the desert, "authority" is the sand dunes in the desert. Thus "power" without "authority" is merely a glamorous decoration. Yet "authority" without "power" is a grievance, the stuff for an incipient revolt. "Power" aligned to, synchronised with and in harmony with "authority" is the apogee of influence and mastery over society, as was the rare case under former ANC President Nelson Mandela.

It is also why former ANC Deputy President and President, Thabo Mbeki, could turn every ANC office he held before 2007 into the ANC's most impactful, why Kgalema Motlanthe lost steam upon becoming the ANC deputy president, why Cyril Ramaphosa was such a weak and ineffective ANC SG compared t Mantashe, why former ANC presidents Gumede, Pixley ka Seme, Dr Xuma, Dr Moroka and Thabo Mbeki were all successfully toppled from ANC power by agitation from within the ANC. But it is also why the much more flawed Jacob Zuma has hung in there, at least so far.

But the ANC desert dunes are forever in motion, formation and agitation. Here politics is like nature, allow for no vacuum or pause, forever in constant change and dynamic. Where these dunes next put their fickle roots is as easy to guess as guessing whether a monkey playing dart blindfolded will hit the bull eye. So in two or five years time Mantashe and or Zuma, may still hold onto to their "power", but find themselves denuded of their "authority" and buried deep under the dunes upon dunes of shifting Kalahari desert sand of ANC politics. Because in the ANC there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies. Only eternal strategic ANC interests.

Of course the biggest danger facing Mantashe and Zuma is one of post-Mangaung hubris. As Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times of 18 November 2012:

"Winning an election doesn't just offer the chance to govern the country. It offers a chance to feel morally and intellectually superior to the party you have just beaten. This is an inescapable aspect of democratic culture..."

But perhaps the life and times of one of the most influential Soviet communist party officials, Mikhael Suslov, will help Mantashe to root his feet to the ground as he reaches for the ANC and SA political stars. Suslov became known to the whole world late in his life as the protector and promoter, [together with Yuri Andropov, the Soviet KGB head,] of Mikhail Gorbachev, who dismantled the Soviet Union hardly nine years after Suslov's death in 1982. Suslov became the CPSU's chief ideologue because of his unmatched cunning to read the strategic shifts within the CPSU and the Soviet Union. He rose through the ranks of the party as one of the most loyal enforcer of Joseph Stalin's rule. But later he was one of the chief supporters of Khrushchev's post-Stalin power-grab. He initially did not whole-heartedly support Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the 1956 party congress. But by the following year, Suslov was a chief defender of Khrushev against an attempted 'putsch' by some pro-Stalin elements within the party leadership. But he still remained very Stalinist by ideology, as demonstrated by his agitation for and support of the crushing of the Hungarian anti-Communist uprising in 1956. But in 1964 he engineered the ouster of Khrushev from power and his replacement by Leonid Brezhnev.

Yet by 1979/1980, he was already positioning himself for influence in the post-Brezhnev era, given the ailments and senility afflicting Brezhnev at the time. He consequently, in collaboration with Yuri Andropov, fast-tracked the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev through the top party ranks, firstly 'javelin-throwing' Gorbachev as the alternate member of the powerful CPSU's Politburo in 1980 and a full member by 1981. Gorbachev, as the youngest Politburo member, was assured to rise to the very top once the geriatric members around him started falling and dying one by one, including Brezhnev. In 1982 Suslov himself died of a severe stroke brought about, allegedly, by a massive heart attack resulting from an equally massive argument he had with a member of the Brezhnev family over the Brezhnev family's alleged corruption. But 1985, three years after Suslov's death, Gorbachev took full control of the CPSU and the Soviet Union. By 1992 the Soviet Union and the CPSU were dissolved and forever ceased to exist. The cold war ended.

In comparison to the long record of Suslov, the much shorter political record of Gwede Mantashe is already impressive enough and can hold its own candle against that of Suslov. Whilst the secretary general of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Mantashe dealt brutally and decisively with the now leader of the new trade union AMCU, Muthunjwa, by summarily expelling him from NUM for "ill-discipline and insubordination", at least as told by Jan de Lange in his Miningmx Mining Yearbook/FinWeek article entitled "The rise and rise of AMCU." (02 September 2011).

Mantashe, together with former ANC deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, was trusted enough by the pro-Zuma NEC of 2007 that he was half of a two-man delegation that was sent to inform former President Mbeki that the ANC was recalling him (Mbeki) from office and withdrawing its mandate to him as SA State President. About this Mbeki recall, Mantashe, showing clearly that he was more than a mere reluctant messenger of the Zuma NEC to Mbeki, revealed, during his Dan Tloome Memorial Lecture in 2008, the following:

"The Pietermaritzburg High Court judgment was the tipping point. The decision to recall Cde Mbeki became urgent in that the movement had to remove one of the poles so that the movement can unite itself behind a single movement, a single leadership collective and a single programme...We appreciated that in any revolution there are cases where loyalty to the commander becomes stronger than to the movement...The mass resignation of Ministers and Deputy Ministers is a clear illustration of this reality." (Source of Mantashe's Dan Tloome Memorial Lecture (03 October 2008): SACP).

Maybe Mantashe's most astonishing political triumph was the total and shattering defeat he delivered on the ANCYL and its leaders Julius Malema, Sindiso Magaqa and Floyd Shivambu, through the expulsion of the former and the expulsion of the latter two. It was the first massive and public defeat delivered on the 'ANC kingmaker' ANCYL since its formation back in 1944. Perhaps the cherry on top of Mantashe's victory cake was how he outsmarted the former ANC deputy president, former ANC treasurer general Matthews Phosa and former deputy secretary general Thandi Modise, all known ANCYL and Forces for Change sympathisers, to agree to attend a press conference at Luthuli House, the ANC head office, which validated the ANC disciplinary process on the three former ANC leaders. On 04 April 2012, the Sowetan led with the story entitled "ANC top guns show unity", by Moipone Malefane.

The united front was made necessary by the imperative on the ANC leadership to manage the public fall-out from Malema's expulsion. The previous Friday, Julius Malema, addressing a packed student audience at the University of Witwatersrand, and accompanied by the former ANC treasurer general, had publicly called ANC President Jacob Zuma "a dictator", to the consternation of the ANC leadership and membership.

That the former ANC deputy president later sought to condemn the ANC disciplinary process that led to the expulsion of Malema is discredited and undermined by his willing participation in the only public press conference of the Top Six between 2007 and 2012, in support of Malema's expulsion. However glum he looked at this media conference, Motlanthe did say, on behalf of the Top Six assembled before the media, that "we will never allow anyone to divide us." Neither was the former wife of Nelson Mandela, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a very close ally of Julius Malema and an ANC powerhouse in her own right, spared the wrath of Mantashe.

The Sowetan of 20 July 2012 reported that Mantashe came down hard on Winnie Mandela, like a ton of bricks, for supporting the expelled former ANCYL Leader Malema. Mantashe accused Winnie Madikizela-Mandela of going against the decision of the ANC NEC on Malema.

By the time of Mangaung last December the ANC Top Six was hopelessly divided. Motlanthe became the biggest casualty of Mangaung, and Mantashe, at least by the vote account alone, its biggest beneficiary.

Given what Mantashe said about the COSATU leader, Zwelinzima Vavi, in his exclusive Business Day interview with Sam Mkokeli, as well as in his secretary general's Organisational Report to the ANC Mangaung conference, the question on everyone's lip is whether Vavi is the next target on Mantashe's firing line, and whether Vavi can survive such a close combat with Mantashe, given the latter's undoubted Suslovian factional combat skills and experience. Are Vavi's days as COSATU general secretary numbered?

At times it seems that Mantashe is not content to go after the living only, but also prowls our history books to knock down cold-dead anyone he does not hold in high esteem, in the way Mikhael Suslov once went after Stalin and Khrushev in their postlife. He was reported by the Sowetan of 23 July 2012 as such:

"During the lesson, Mantashe was asked why is much not known about Mashinini despite his historic role as a student leader in the 1976 students' uprising?"

Sowetan further wrote:

"Mantashe's response was that Mashinini was unknown because he did not join any of the mainstream liberation movements when he went into exile. Mantashe said the student leader did not join the ANC and therefore, he could not say much about Mashinini." (Ido Lekota, "Mantashe's history lesson calls for a rewrite", Sowetan).

In conclusion, I have no doubt that ANC's Gwede Mantashe is our own black Mikhael Suslov - our own foremost party ideologue, party line enforcer, ideas interpreter, major power-broker and a tough disciplinarian. Like Suslov, he seems reluctant to reach for the very pinnacle of ANC and SA top-shelve power, but content to be powerful behind the powerful. Like Suslov, he is intimately associated with the recall from power of a head of state (Mbeki) and the defeat of another (Motlanthe).

Like Suslov humbled Hungary and Czekoslovakia to enforce a Soviet party line, Mantashe has politically humiliated and throttled the once self-confident  ANCYL and turned it into from a fearsome, snarling bulldog into a servile lap-dog with a funny bark and false teeth.

But will Mantashe continue to survive and thrive on the shifting dunes of ANC factional politics? Or in the post-Mangaung euphoria and hubris, does he now "feel morally and intellectually superior" over any ANC leader and over any SA politician? Is the endless celebration and commemoration of this or that in the history of the ANC beginning to distort and alter his sense of political reality, his appreciation of the calm, cool but also very dangerous dark night of the desert landscape, when most dunes shift and reshift to be formed, reformed and deformed?

In his brilliant article entitled "Is the party still on?", Jeremy Cronin, the current deputy secretary general of the SACP and Mantashe's very close friend and colleague, made this very important point as the opening paragraph of his memorable piece:

"Mikhael Gorbachev, who presided over the liquidation of his own communist party, is not generally well regarded in communist circles. There is, however, at least one pertinent observation in his book, Perestroika. There he writes that he realised there was need for change in the former Soviet Union when the programme of the party was increasingly determined by the march of the calendar, by a ritualistic commemoration of his historical dates." (Sunday Times (SA) Review, 31 July 2011).

And so, to paraphrase the title of Jeremy Cronin's Sunday Times input, we need to ask Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary general, the question:

Is the ANC centenary celebratory party still on? Is the programme of the ruling ANC increasingly determined by the march of the calendar, and by a ritualistic commemoration of historical dates? Is there a threat of 'liquidation' to the ANC, in the long run, from such a march of the calendar and from such a ritualistic commemoration?

Will Mantashe, as a leading light of the Zuma ANC, be able to prevent an outbreak of a third, debilitating Hobbesian "war of all against all" amongst ANC factions between 2012-2017? Or will Mantashe remember the warning of the great revolutionary Germam poet, Bertolt Brecht that:

"Carthage went to war three times. She was strong the first time; She was rich the second; After the third, no one remembered where Carthage was."

Written by:

Isaac Mpho Mogotsi is Executive Director Centre of Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA).

He can also be followed on Twitter at @rabokala1

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