Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma congratulates Cyril Ramaphosa following his election as ANC President at the 54th ANC elective conference in Johannesburg on December 18, 2017. Nine years after his 2017 campaign, the country is still no wiser about the identity of Ramaphosa’s funders or the extent to which the list includes people occupying key positions in organs of state, says the writer.
Prof. Sipho Seepe
The unseemly spat between former Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the first and only woman to chair the African Union, and her comrades-turned-adversaries, ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula and current Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Ronald Lamola, has dominated public conversation.
The dispute was triggered by Dlamini-Zuma’s remarks implicating her party colleagues in vote-buying at ANC conferences. This is fundamentally a political problem, not a legal one. Threats of litigation serve mainly as a diversion.
In December 2022, shortly after the conference, Gwede Mantashe, then newly re-elected as national chairperson of the ANC, was characteristically blunt when quizzed about vote-buying. “If there is one battle we almost lost, it is that of fighting against money.
