Infighting shows up the ANC for what it now really is

President Cyril Ramaphosa is sometimes caricatured as a buffalo (because he breeds the animals on his game farm, perhaps). But in the kill-or-be-killed, eat-or-be-eaten world of ANC politics, the hyenas, jackals and vultures seem to be circling him, smelling blood.

For more than a year after their defeat at the ANC’s elective conference at Nasrec at the end of 2017, the clique of state capturers around Jacob Zuma kept a low profile while Ramaphosa trumpeted his “new dawn” as the end to corruption, cronyism and incompetence.

Over the past few months, though, as it has become apparent the wheels are coming off the South African economy, the Zuma-ites’ fightback brigade has become increasingly bold.

The coalition of the wounded and excluded ranges from angry socialist unionists, to those who have revived the Bell Pottinger narrative of “white monopoly capital” and those becoming increasingly nervous about the work of the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture and the Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of Impropriety regarding the Public Investment Corporation – probing dodgy investments of billions of rands of civil servants’ pension money – that could bring them to book.

The focus now is on Ramaphosa’s supposedly neoliberal economic policy, which is being portrayed as selling out to capitalism through the attempts to rescue ailing state-owned enterprises.

What is disturbing for Ramaphosa and his supporters is that some of his erstwhile Nasrec allies – including Deputy President David Mabuza and Lindiwe Sisulu – have defected to the other side. They are both ambitious and openly covet the top jobs in the ANC and government.

The infighting has shown the ANC for what it now is: a loose collection of political opportunists who pay lip service to the organisation’s aim of “a better life for all”, while looking to line their own pockets.

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