POLITICS
Mbeki's game plan
James Myburgh |
02 July 2007
If the leadership generally said ‘look, we believe the interest of the ANC and the country will be best served if we have somebody else’, that's fine. If they said stay for whatever good reason, that will be fine. You can't act in a way that disrespected such a view.
The full interview, conducted by Snuki Zikalala, was aired on SABC 2 on Sunday evening. Perhaps more significant than Mbeki’s reported comments, were others he made on how he envisaged the election process progressing. When first asked by
Zikalala whether he would accept a nomination to stand for president Mbeki replied:
My view is that is that is a matter that we would discuss among the leadership. I don’t think it is an individual decision. When the nomination process starts later this year, if there are any such nominations we will discuss that… among the leadership to say what is in the best interests of the organisation and the country
and so on.
Normally, Mbeki continued, nominations for the top positions of the ANC are basically decided “collectively” by the leadership. This was, he said, “very correct” and a “very good tradition in the organisation.”
It is not as though you know people pursue individual ambitions. So in this case certainly, if there was such nomination, we would discuss it among the leadership to say ‘well how would we respond to it’.
If the leadership said he should stay on as ANC president, Mbeki then said, “that will be fine” and he would accept that decision.
What these remarks indicate is that Mbeki is not planning for an open competitive contest for the ANC presidency at the national conference in December. Rather, once nominations have been received the leadership would choose, from among the nominees,
the person they thought best for the top position.
This person would, presumably, then be presented to the conference as the sole candidate for ANC president and voted into office by acclamation. The nominees who had been passed over would somehow be accommodated and/or prevailed upon not to
contest the decision.
Before the 1994, 1997, and 2002, conferences the leadership had decided upon (and successfully enforced) a single candidate for the top three positions in the ANC. This is the “tradition” that Mbeki is referring to.
So, what Mbeki was essentially saying was that (if he got his way) only one person would be allowed by the leadership to stand for ANC president. And if the leadership decided that that one person should be him, he would have no choice but to accept that decision.
Quite clearly Mbeki would prefer the contest for ANC president to be decided behind closed doors – where is an acknowledged master of internal party battles – than in an open and unpredictable popularity contest, which he knows he could well lose.
Indeed, if reports from the policy conference are at all accurate it appears as if the prevailing mood among delegates was against a third term for Mbeki as ANC president. At the beginning of the conference ANC secretary general, Kgalema Motlanthe, presented a number of possible options for the election of the party
president.
One of them was for the president of the ANC, as elected at the national conference in December, to automatically stand as ANC candidate for president of the country.
Since Mbeki would have served out his two terms in office as SA president in 2009 this option would preclude his candidacy for the party in 2007.
Another was to elect the ANC president, but then to leave the decision on who should be the party's candidate for state president in the hands of the ANC NEC. This would allow Mbeki to stand, and if elected, effectively anoint his successor.
According to Sapa the first suggestion “elicited applause” from delegates, while the conference audibly “groaned” at the announcement of the second. The compromise resolution eventually adopted by the policy conference stated that:
Judging from the reports from various commissions, there is general agreement that the ANC President should preferably be the ANC candidate for the President of the Republic. There was also a strong view that this must not be made a principle.
In one sense this was a moral victory for the anti-Mbeki camp, for it recorded the sentiment of most delegates, but in practical terms the resolution placed no obstacle on Mbeki’s plans for a third term. Further on it stated, rather confusingly, that “there is no need for a term limit on the leadership of the ANC since they are elected for one term at a time.”
