Thabo Mbekis letter to deputy president Paul Mashatile has reignited the Phala Phala scandal. [Picture: Sunday World]
Former president Thabo Mbeki’s scathing letter to African National Congress (ANC) deputy president Paul Mashatile on the party’s behaviour in Parliament should be a wake up call to the ruling party’s leadership, say analysts.
Speaking in an interview on the Ashraf Garda Show on Salaamedia, political analysts Dr Ebrahim Harvey and Dr Fikile Vilakazi said the former statesman’s letter was a direct attack on the party’s apparent protection of President Cyril Ramaphosa over Phala Phala.
In December 2022, just a fortnight before Ramaphosa’s re-election as party leader at its national elective conference, former chief justice Sandile Ngcobo found that Ramaphosa had a case to answer regarding the 2020 theft of $ 580 000 (about R10 million) from his game farm in Limpopo. The ANC later used its majority in Parliament to prevent an inquiry into the scandal.
“… are we saying that we suspect or know that he has done something impeachable and therefore decided that we must protect our president at all costs by ensuring that no MPC is formed?” Mbeki inquired in the 17-page letter.
Mbeki raised deep-seated concerns about the manner in which the ANC in Parliament “is repeating the mistakes of the past,” said Dr Fikile Vilakazi from the University of the Western Cape (UWC). “That is what is troubling former president Thabo Mbeki.”
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Ramifications of Mbeki’s letter
Speaking about the ramifications that the letter might have in the build up to the elections next year, independent analyst Dr Ebrahim Harvey said it may deal the ANC a blow but will not result in the party recalling Ramaphosa from office.
“This letter is going to have negative ramifications for the ANC in 2024. Mbeki still wields a lot of clout, don’t forget, and his letter would have been penned with a lot of conspiration, even with 2024 elections in mind.”
It might also arm Ramaphosa’s opponents within the party,” he said.
“It is obviously bound to have massive ramifications even in the ANC. The opposing faction who opposed Ramaphosa’s reelection [are] going to make a lot of capital out of Mbeki’s letter. The ANC is a mess of contradictions.”
Adding to the implications suggested by Harvey, Vilakazi said the letter also showed South Africans how disunited the party had become.
“Relationships within the ANC are irretrievably damaged,” she posited. “That letter should tell you the relationships are damaged. The relationships are not working. They don’t love each other, they don’t trust each other anymore as revolutionaries and that is something that they are projecting to the nation.”
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Mbeki’s intentions
Vilakazi suggested that while the letter may well have been written within the context of being an issue of “legacy”, it was also an indirect word of caution to South Africans to vote wisely next year.
“The ANC has lost support and this is a letter that says it’s too late. South Africans are thinking differently [and] there is no way the ANC is going to recover in 2024 with the kind of response given by deputy president Paul Mashatile.
Harvey, meanwhile, believed Mbeki’s intention was to encourage the party to take responsibility for the way it dealt with the Phala Phala saga.
“What he wants, without any shred of doubt, is the ANC to take responsibility for this thing and to deal with it properly,” he said.
Referring to Ncgobo’s report, he said “the ANC should never have rejected it because that independent Parliamentary report says consistently it is provisional … It is not saying that Ramaphosa’s guilty. It’s only saying indeed there is enough evidence to produce a prima facie verdict that there’s a case to be answered.”
Mbeki, president of South Africa between 1999 and 2008, slipped out of the public eye after his dramatic ousting in 2008. He has, however, been critical of Ramaphosa’s administration in recent years.
