Days are dark and friends are few

Here’s an interesting factoid: the only person who hasn’t disappeared into political obscurity after leaving the ANC has been Julius Malema. The former youth league mafia don successfully turned his ouster from the ANC into the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).

There are those who say Malema survived and thrived because he never really left the ANC, because the ruling party is using the EFF as a stalking horse, or even as storm troopers to bring about a “national democratic revolution”, or “radical economic transformation” without spooking investors and the middle class, never mind white people.

That is a discussion for another day because the current goings-on around ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule beg the question: what will happen to him if he does get arrested in connection with state capture? Unlike Jacob Zuma – and even though he is part of the Zuma faction – Magashule doesn’t have anything like the former president’s charisma nor, even more importantly, a tribal support base … as Zuma has in KwaZulu-Natal.

Also, the ANC being what it is – an organisation of opportunistic hyenas ready to devour the weak and wounded at the slightest chance – many will have already calculated the political wind direction … and that is not in favour of Magashule.

With the arrests in connection with corruption, President Cyril Ramaphosa has been looking politically stronger than he has in many months. Challenging him now, for those fence-sitters in the ANC, might not be the best way to ensure a long political career. Magashule, on the other hand, looked lost and weak this week with his attempts to claim a warrant of arrest had been issued for him.

Times are getting dark for him and in the ANC, those times mean friends are few.

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