The politics of ANC ‘flies’, ‘mosquitoes’ and ‘dung beetles’ with leading actor positional-power-intoxicated Mantashe

By: Clyde Ramalaine 

– Is the ANC surrendered to a form of toxic Gwedeism from which it cannot extricate itself?-

Shannon L. Adler reminds us, “You can’t fight mental health bias if you label people based on a list of symptoms and you have no medical degree to diagnose people….” We are in a silly season with less than four months to the ANC’s 55th Conference, where policies will be adopted, and its elective conference will unfold. It is a given that this in the ANC setting makes up a silly season since strange things and, even more, bizarre statements about ANC members are made at whim. The ringleader for labelling members all and sundry is increasingly its Chairperson Gwede Samson Mantashe.

Mantashe details an interesting character, his rise in ANC politics is perhaps abnormal and unexpected. He joined the ANC very late since the first mention of Mantashe shows in the early 90s. It is not a sin to have joined the ANC late. However, it helps to explain his epistemology, or lack thereof, of the organisation he joined and later was privileged to lead in NOB positions. We must not assume those who lead necessarily were schooled in the ANC. Freak accidents in political party history detailing leadership is not an uncommon thing. In the USA, the Republicans produced a freak leadership in Trump, who remains the most unorthodox and foreign to actual Republican ideology leader it produced.

Another aspect is that while the Republicans know how harmful Trump is, unfortunately, it has surrendered itself to Trumpism and is now subservient to his antics. The ANC also has its slice of freak leadership who are not representative of its inherent values, beliefs, and practices, yet they are in senior leadership positions. Is the ANC surrendered to a form of toxic Gwedeism from which in this season it cannot extricate itself? Some see him as the master factionalist, one who thrives on such.

Is it not strange that no one in the ANC ever dares to reprimand Mantashe? A law unto himself, not even retired leaders take issue with him. Is the ANC surrendered to the kite-flying of Gwedeism, who operates as an accepted bully? Everybody is scared of Mantashe in the ANC; the question is why and for what sane reason?

Mantashe is currently serving in his 15th year as a National Office Bearer member and has transitioned from Secretary-General to Chairperson. In a complete break with the symbolism of a created position of Chairperson, a position then designed to accommodate OR Tambo when Mandela was leading the ANC, Mantashe, with his NUM organised labour skills and practices, recrafted this position into a contemporary final authority abusing the absence of a lack of a functional SGO. He is on record to be eyeing another term, wherever in the NOB structure of the ANC, he often accords himself the right of final authority in the ANC.

In my article Pint-sized ANC DSG Jessie Duarte was not small; I stated Duarte said her gripe with Mantashe on a particular moment in the booing of some leaders at COSATU Workers-Day rally, was him saying to her, ‘when you angry, you act like a typical Coloured woman.’ This is Mantashe, the master-labeller and supreme bully from Tarkastad.

It is also essential to appreciate that Mantashe served the entire two terms of President Zuma and the current term of President Ramaphosa. He presided over nine failed impeachment attempts defending Zuma and, in one decision, switched allegiance to Ramaphosa with a sense of ease. So, while Fikile Mbalula and others are accused of often switching allegiance, Mantashe is never accused, let alone called out for such behaviour. The reason for stating this is to categorially assert that Mantashe is an integral cog of the good, bad, ugly, and indifferent that defines the ANC in manifold public discourse, with particular emphasis on the last 15 years of the ANC. That good may be the ANC in its adoption of critical policies and its delivery on commitments if and when such occurred in the rightful quest of ameliorating the past.

He, however, also cannot escape the bad of factionalism, the agony of triumphalism, the ambivalence of questionable moral rectitude, and the known state of endemic disunity measurable in groups- in-groups. Neither can he escape the test of leadership as measurable of an organisation that cannot be any celebrated employer since it perpetually fails to pay staff salaries lest we remember how he again shot his lip without thinking when workers complained about outstanding salaries. A year ago, on August 26, Mantashe would dispassionately, if not callously, tweet in response to workers with the following words: “ANC source of excitement is not a salary, it’s helping people. But people must be paid.”

It is a matter of record that Mantashe enjoys the usage of comparing either ANC members or those he disregards in frames of insects. Terms like ‘counter- revolutionary’ [in reference to the Zuma letter addressed to Ramaphosa in the heart of COVID] and ‘hired gun’ [in reference to his recent expression of Carl Niehaus] flow easily from Mantashe’s lips without any restraint. One is not always sure if using these terms or labels to define and caste people is based on any theoretical comprehension or sheer brute run-of-the-mouth arrogance in which he accords himself the right to be a bully.

Mantashe and I had several meetings during his tenure as Secretary-General, but never since he became Chairperson. We would not meet since he called me in April 2018 to ask if I do not think I am harsh on Ramaphosa. Needless to say, that conversation went awry. I told him categorically that I would never support Ramaphosa and could never reconcile with his agenda for the ANC or SA. I, however, involuntarily recall meeting Mantashe. In the said meeting, I could not help but share with him that he often has very interesting, helpful contributions to make. However, his facial expressions and candour can be unkind since it destroys what he has to say, besides being very undiplomatic most of the time. He put his pen down and said to me, ‘you are the second person after my father that said something similar.’ Those who have encountered him as working under his leadership at Luthuli House will tell Mantashe that the bully quickly dismisses opposing views and pulverises people he does not appreciate. I recently told him no one appointed you the chair of what is an analysis and what is not; stop acting as if you are the final authority on everything we write about the ANC.

I have elsewhere contended that some researchers must at some point engage the role that three consecutive former organised labour secretary-generals played in the state of the ANC. I refer here to Ramaphosa, Motlanthe, and Mantashe. Those mentioned above are all from the defunct, dishelleved, and directionless NUM stable as it currently depicts. Shall we forget how Mantashe boasted of this achievement at one of the trade union leaders’ gatherings and made snide comments about suspended ANC secretary general Ace Magashule? Maybe Mantashe’s labelling of all and sundry is symptomatic of him assuming he is running NUM as union boss ? I have in 2012 written about the ‘business of unionism’. As such, I lamented how unions and trade formations operate as fully-fledged capitalist businesses wholly calibrated and acclimatised to the Adam Smith model of capitalism in South Africa. Ideology union bosses often condemn in a hypocritical sense when they address the masses while celebrating at year-end functions in tuxedos.

Unfortunately, organised workers and their leadership are, by their own design, minimalist and inward-looking unless they are conscientious. It is even worse since they were co-opted through the investment entities, there are no more shopfloor representatives or worker control, but boards predetermine their future relations. So for almost thirty years, the ANC had this minimalist, self-conscious, and waged negotiating-centred leadership focussed at the helm of its Secretary-General organisational, functional expression. Is this not the perfect success story of white monopoly capital, which produced Ramaphosa as far back as 1978 in Urban Foundation, the brainchild of Harry Oppenheimer?

However, on the day of its launch in Johannesburg, Anton Rupert articulated the vision of the UF. In the words of billionaire Clive Menell’s wife Irene, ‘we adopted Cyril as a charity gesture.’ Harry Oppenheimer would later sponsor the much milder union that would give Ramaphosa his ‘biggest strike’ in 1986, which got him into pound-seat to bargaining with the ANC as de-facto representative of the workers’ cause lest we forget how Ramaphosa betrayed the late Piroshaw Camay, who introduced him as a novice to the organised labour world, on the naming of the new union. I am trying to say that understanding Mantashe cannot happen outside the historical context of his NUM involvement which is the union that Ramaphosa comes from.

Mantashe is on record to have, on numerous occasions, resorted to his most used Chinese analogy of tigers and flies. After all, he could not escape the label of being a ‘tiger’ when infidelity allegations were published against him. No pun intended. He has, on numerous occasions, resorted to referring to the analogy of ‘flies’ versus ‘tigers’ for a description of people in various settings.

In 2017 Mantashe arrogated a right in liberty to talk about ‘flies’ and ‘tigers’ in reference to members and leaders of the ANC. His public relations lesson to the ANC tersely instructs, “know your tigers and flies.”

During a media briefing in 2018 following the budget tabling, Mantashe told journalists that corruption must be dealt with “aggressively and unashamedly .”He spoke explicitly about licenses granted to those who were “connected” or paid for them. “If there is proof of discovering people taking kickbacks and corruption – we will recover from them.” Mantashe said that he liked the lesson from China, not to only “deal with flies, but deal with tigers as well” when it comes to fighting corruption.

Mantashe again used his Chinese adopted ‘flies’ and ‘tigers’ to describe those who will be dealt with in the fight against corruption. Mantashe said that processing applications for mining licences was “fraught with greater challenges and laced with corruption.”

Let us hear Mantashe on the eve of the 54th ANC Conference held at Nasrec in December 2017. He said the organisation was “tightly-knit during the struggle against apartheid, but that once things opened up, “mosquitoes” with different objectives started treating elections as life and death struggles.” Incidentally, during that same period, chair of the ANC sub-committee on policies, Jeff Radebe, said the conference would remove the “rotten elements” and keep those who put the ANC first and not themselves.”

This combined statement of Mantashe and Radebe under normal circumstances would ring so noble and egalitarian until you ask why can’t the case be made that the very analysts on the ANC, as mentioned earlier, constitute part of the ‘mosquitoes’ and ‘rotten elements’ as the respectively advance. This myth that the ANC was naturally pure and free from corruption as a movement since its inception is nothing but romanticism and course managing of history. It also means those who advance it simply do not know the ANC. Their premise for comparing the ANC while in the bush with the ANC in Mahlamba-Ndlopfu is brutally misplaced.

In direct response to the calls for the ANC to trust more young people, he recently retorted, “The ANC had attracted not only upright citizens, but also those who want to use it to enrich themselves. He said some of the calls for younger leaders to take over the Party are not political but part of the battle for access to resources… This season, he is now reverting to his 2012 statement labelling some ‘mosquitos’ (bloodsuckers), and the mosquitoes, I suppose, are retaliating by calling him a dung beetle. (manure or waste-pusher). Trust the ANC to give us our new lexicon. We are now in the season of bloodsuckers and manure-pushers ANC politics. Can it get lower than that? Your guess is as good as mine. At times Mantashe reminds one of Donald Trump. He, like Trump, often shoots from the obdurate hip and does not care to think how it comes out as long as he has his say and that say is the final authority on the matter.

The politics of ‘flies,’ ‘mosquitoes,’ and ‘dung beetles’ dictate an emerging phenomenon in the ANC where some are defined as flies [pests], interchangeably mosquitoes [blood suckers], or as Radebe called them ‘rotten elements’ because labelling them this way firstly makes those who label the natural expert analyst on the organisational welfare of the ANC.

Secondly, it affords the guru-analysts to thus wholly exonerate themselves as neither ‘flies’ nor ‘mosquitoes’ since they define the constructs or conditions for assessment. Thirdly, it provides the analyst a right to continue in blind observation of what really is wrong with the organisation he leads as Chairperson. The notion of ‘dung beetle’ thus is a reactionary and responsive one since it retaliates by the same common denominator of an insect as wilfully employed by the arrogated guru to describe those upon whom he first exacts such inferences. Theirs is a reaction and nascent response to the arrogance of those who deem it their right to label others ad-in-finitum from the privilege of a vaporising positional power.

In the social science lexicon, we talk of what Mantashe does is engaging in ‘othering .’The term othering describes the reductive action of labelling and defining a person as a subaltern native, as someone who belongs to the socially subordinate category of the Other.

It would be remiss of me to dare to unpack the politics of flies, mosquitoes, and dung beetles, an increasing phenomenon in ANC organisation, without first appreciating some basic things about these insects.

Concerning Flies:

Contrary to the ignorance of some, more than 110000 fly species are buzzing around the planet. These include fruit flies, house flies to flesh flies, each with their own habits and habitats. If we wonder why a fly infestation can quickly spiral out of control, it is due to its reproductive cycle. We know a single fruit fly can lay around 500 eggs in her lifetime; the life cycle from egg to adult only takes around a week. Equally so, a single female house fly can lay up to 500 eggs over three to four days and repeat the cycle multiple times throughout her life. House flies typically live 15 to 25 days but can survive up to two months under optimal conditions. Meaning their population can spread in multiplication over a concise period.

Concerning Mosquitoes:

Mosquitoes are among the deadliest animals in the world. Half of the deaths attributed to these insects are associated with malaria. But mosquitoes are carriers of several other parasites, viruses, and nematodes (roundworms) that threaten the health of humans. Surprisingly, the general public tends to be ill-informed about mosquitoes. Regarding the mosquitoes, we owe our appreciation for the source of the deadly disease to Nobel Laurette Sir Ronald Ross. On August 20, 1897, he discovered the malaria parasites in India’s gut of Anopheles mosquitoes. We are told before this discovery, “for thousands of years; malaria was a mysterious illness affecting people across the globe. Even the name of the disease, ‘malaria,’ derived from two Italian words meaning ‘bad air, highlights the confusion around the transmission of this disease.” It was only following the discovery of malaria parasites in the gut of Anopheles mosquitoes in India by Sir Ronald Ross on August 20, 1897, that a clearer picture of the role of the mosquito in the malaria transmission cycle emerged.

There are still many things scientists don’t understand either. For example, how do mosquitoes find us? What do they like about us? And why are some mosquitoes just a biting pest while others are deadly? In addition, new mosquito species are still being described and discovered. Species previously not thought of as vectors are now implicated in malaria transmission. Malaria research scientists have chosen some interesting facts about mosquitoes to share with us. These also highlight what they mean for public health.

Not all mosquitoes are created equal. Mosquitoes are generally considered the noisy nuisance that pesters you at night. But they differ significantly in their biology and distribution. There are around 3,500 mosquito species belonging to five general. The whiny mosquito that instantly comes to mind is most likely a member of the Culex genus, active at night. Reading on the Culex genus, I was tempted to see Mantashe’s prism on mosquitoes as essentially predicated on the irritancy of the insect. He, therefore, seeks to accentuate the irritancy instead of the danger for a frame of his mosquito notion in the description of others.

Some mosquitoes do not bite at all. Female anopheline mosquitoes interact with you when in search of a blood meal. They use the proteins in the blood to assist with egg production. In her search for essential proteins, the female malaria mosquito bites – she doesn’t sting. Male malaria mosquitoes are harmless and play a critical role in the pollination of plants. We are unsure if Mantashe’s exacting of the label mosquito is remotely cognisant or sensitive to this truism that the researchers share. We, therefore, must surmise this knowledge is not known or useful for Mantashe when he labels ANC and others with this notion of mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes transmit only certain diseases. Despite being associated with a wide range of conditions, mosquitoes are not capable of transmitting viruses such as HIV, Ebola, or the novel coronavirus.

Concerning dung beetles:

A primary school friend did his Ph.D. at Stellenbosch and researched the dung beetle. The Brittanica dictionary defines the dung beetle with the subfamily Scarabaeidae, also called dungchafer or tumblebug, as any of a group of beetles in the family Scarabaeidae (insect order Coleoptera) that forms manure into a ball using its scooper-like head and paddle-shaped antennae.

The waste ball can be as large as an apple in some species. In the early part of the summer, the dung beetle buries itself and the ball and feeds on it. Later the females lay eggs in the dung. Dung beetles are usually round with short wing covers (elytra) that expose the end of the abdomen. They vary in size from 5 to 30 mm (0.2 to about 1.2 inches) and are usually dark in colour, although some have a metallic lustre.

In many species, there is a long, curved horn on the top of the male’s head. Dung beetles can eat more than their own weight in 24 hours and are considered helpful to humans because they speed up the process of converting manure to substances usable by other organisms.
Is Mantashe understanding Xi Jinping’s China as the laboratory for using his ‘flies’ and ‘tigers’ notion? Do we warrant understanding what Jinping meant?

Immediately after being appointed Party’s General Secretary, Xi Jinping pointed out endemic corruption as an essential threat, which should lead to the Party’s collapse and the state’s downfall. The Fan Fubai, anti-corruption, is the preliminary condition of Xi’s political reform process. According to the official statements, its objective is to reach a political system where party officials are unwilling and unable to use public power for private interests. We must uphold the fighting of tigers and flies simultaneously, resolutely investigating law-breaking cases of leading officials and earnestly resolving the unhealthy tendencies and corruption problems around people. Xi Jinping, January 26, 2013.

Stephan Collignon and Vittorio Allegri, in their seminal piece, ” ‘Tigers and Flies’ The ancient roots of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign,” attempted to appreciate what informs Xi Jinping’s philosophy for an anti-corruption campaign, contend two classical philosophies as at the centre of China’s history of political thought. These they identify as Chinese Legalism (Fa Jia 法家) and Confucianism (Ruzhe 儒者), respectively. They conclude that the ongoing anti-corruption campaign has features of these classical Chinese social and political theories.

As Xi referred to it in his opening speech in front of the CCDI, the anti-corruption campaign adopted the usage of tigers and flies and started a few weeks after Xi’s rise to power. It was highly publicized through state-run media, and it occupied the highest places on the political agenda up to this day, and it is likely to escalate until the 19th party congress in 2017.

The method used to deal with the corruption was that in late 2012, the first inspection teams were set up and sent around China with the plan of investigating all 280 government-controlled bodies. The procedure typically involves sending an inspection team, which will work inside the institution under investigation for about one month, reporting directly to Wang Qishan and the Central Leading Group for Inspection Work. The teams usually consist of retired senior officials appointed on an ad hoc basis and are temporary. The team has full investigative powers and authority to act at its own discretion, without the need to request any mandate or else. It conducts audits, collects proof, and compiles reports for submission in search of health tendencies for the Party. The CIG debriefs the CCDI and Xi in person on its findings after every investigation.

In the end, if someone is found guilty, they will be put in isolation for further investigations through a much-feared extra-legal procedure called shanggui. According to Collignon and Allegri, further investigations are more of a euphemism here because, at that point, the person is already guilty. The CCDI just needs to decide what to do with him and wants to have full secrecy. The shanggui is likely to also involve confessions through torture, as in the case of the death of Party member and SOE engineer Yi Qiyi in April 2013.

Usually, rumours about involvement in corruption are allowed to spread during the investigations, and once the CCDI decides on the case, it publicly announces the arrest. The member that gets investigated is subsequently expelled from the Party, then trialled and sentenced. Usually, if the convicted can be made an example, the trial will go on live broadcast, even though usually sparing capital punishment for high-level officials. The campaign followed mainly four intertwined paths: regional investigations, factional struggle, the encircling of Zhou Yongkang, and the fall of the four big tigers. Jinping, in a 2016 keynote address to the sixth plenum, openly accused these four officials, namely Zhou Yongkang, Ling Jinhua, Xu Caihou, and Guo Buoxiong, of having “engaged in political conspiracy activities together with Bo Xilai.

As with all political campaigns, albeit in the name of fighting corruption, there is always a case regarding the real intent for such a campaign. In the case of the Jinping-led anti-corruption campaign, it is criticised based on the factional affiliation of the investigated officials at the highest levels. Some who critique this campaign compare it to the high level of an anti-corruption campaign during the Mao years. This hypothesis claims that with his campaign, Xi is trying to eliminate the influence of Jiang Zemin in party policy making. Nothing is really changing in the institutions and the behaviour apart from people in power.

Having attempted to understand Xi Jinping’s frame for ‘flies’ and ‘tigers’ in his articulation and praxis of a fight against corruption, we warrant asking for the efficacy of its usage by ANC Chairperson Mantashe. Firstly, Mantashe, the proverbial bus of SG position from which Jinping launched his anti-corruption campaign, has long left. This Means Mantashe cannot claim to follow Jinping since he had, for ten years as Secretary-General, done very little on corruption except for preparing organisational reports. We, therefore, must ask if Mantashe is honest in his persistent reliance on this phenomenon, if not adage and if he is deliberately cognisant of its proper context.

Is Mantashe aware of its articulated pitfalls, remotely conscious of its due criticisms, and present in thoughtful consideration of the distinct differences between the ANC and the CCP? Does he appreciate the colossal differences between China and South Africa China? Does Mantashe understand what sits behind the Xi anti-corruption campaign and whether he is cognisant that the Chinese context and our are distinctly and markedly different? Can we even compare the CCP to the ANC, and if so, why and for what reasons? An excellent place to start would be to ask what classical philosophies of the ANC underpins its apparent campaign against corruption. We had expected the self-appointed master labeller and expert Mantashe to outline such to bolster his conviction for an articulation of ‘flies’ and ‘tigers’ in the ANC setting.

It is one thing to engage in convenient sloganeering to label others. However, it does not hide that one in laziness has failed to appreciate the material conditions and stark differences that inform the different parties and societies one seeks to engage. It is another thing to advance something as gospel when your comprehension of its content is yet to be explained. Notwithstanding your penchant to resort to its usage.

It then would appear Mantashe takes ease of comfort to throw around the Jinping construct less in clarity of political thought, suspect in the consciousness of its disparities and plausibly questionable in lack of its comprehension. He may even use hyperbole of misunderstanding since the application of such oft-cited Chinese philosophy appears to be a disjuncture if the ANC is compared to the CCP. However, as a pure nicety to be associated with since, I suppose, Mantashe at one state was Chairperson of the SACP.

In 2021 in a public address, ANC Chairperson and Mineral and Energy Resources minister Gwede Mantashe said the Party was starting to deal with big guns in its ranks to tackle corruption and factionalism. Mantashe said this while delivering a lecture on the role of the SA Communist Party in building the labour movement in SA. “[The Chinese communists say] if you want to deal with corruption and factionalism, you can’t focus on flies and not touch tigers. You must touch both flies and tigers. This cleansing process of the ANC is beginning to touch both flies and tigers. Firstly addressing the SACP on the matter is perhaps purely symbolic since its historical affinity to the Communist Party could be the veneer. However, conflating the SACP, who did not lead the country and was nowhere ever trusted in ballot record, to lead with the entrusted ANC is necessarily mischievous if not disingenuous. On another score, we do not know what ‘big guns’ in its ranks are being dealt with.

It would appear the ones fingered are a crossbreed of factions, including Ramaphosa and Mantashe and their associated crowd. We need not play amnesia to know that in August 2020, the ANC’s Integrity Commission was emphatic that it never cleared David Mabuza or Gwede Mantashe, who appeared before the IC. This is even though both serve in Cabinet without IC clearance. We warrant not debating that the likes of Zizi Kodwa, to name but one, all listed in various reports for wrongdoing, are untouched, yet Mantashe would protect these while telling the SACP the big guns are being taken on. Let us bring it home. Where does Mantashe places Ramaphosa in the food chain of big guns? So who makes up those Mantashe refers to as big guns that are being dealt with? There exists no substantive record for this claim except viewed through the primordial lens of triumphalism and factionalism entrenched practices of the victors of the Nasrec-bought election.

When Mantashe today is responded to in frames of a ‘dung beetle’, which, as earlier alluded is a response from those he accuses, it details the toxic environment in which some see him also as an insect. This type of insect is described in detail by its name. It has, unfortunately, no meaning outside of the dung it aggressively pushes around, convinced of his own fallacy of cleaning up the ANC. I have said numerous times that the notion of renewal and self-correcting as prognosticated by Ramaphosa, Mantashe, or any of those who still have to explain why they are fingered is a farce. How can the ANC rely on the very people that contaminated it?

To use Mantashe’s statement, the ANC attracted mosquitoes. How are he and all of those fingered in the NOB, NEC, and everywhere else not translating to the dung beetles that push around dung? The interesting thing with dung beetles is that they create a habitat for flies. So if the ANC is today in its state, how can the current leadership and second-generation members of such administration be exempted from the mosquitoes, flies, and dung beetle frames?

‘Flies, Mosquitoes, and Dung beetle’ politics are what the ANC, under the likes of Mantashe as one of its key leaders, translate evidence. He is seen as pushing the factional, bullying, triumphalism, and schizophrenic consciousness of corruption as a tool in the case of the dung beetle manure (waste) that he believes constitutes precious cargo everywhere in the ANC. Will the public judge what type of insect, if not all, he represents between flies, mosquitoes, and dung beetles. I hypothesize that Mantashe has become a final authority in the ANC by default of a weak and vulnerable president Ramaphosa, and has been allowed to parade in the ANC as an erstwhile union boss since Ramaphosa depends on his protection to survive into a second term.

Mantashe statement in response to the quest to have young people in leadership teeters on divisiveness because one is not sure if he is referring to the newly elected KZN Taliban leadership or the Gauteng ‘adiwele’ groups. His known factional antics extend beyond know foes in the ANC. You would recall that in the uprun to the recent Gauteng Conference, one of the contenders, Lebogang Maile, was associated with what came to be known as the ‘adiwele’ campaign. The latter is now circling into a more comprehensive national call for authentic inter-generational ANC leadership. To underscore these factional tendencies and evolving nature of the ANC Chairperson, it is rumoured that when the issue of nominations opened, and Godongwana apparently showed interest in raising his hand, Mantashe was heard making snide remarks on any candidacy of Enoch Godongwana. How can the ANC build with such leadership?

Mantashe and all those who defend their positions with their bums, castigating the youth as part of the competition for resources, are nothing but gatekeepers that perhaps cannot move on. These stand in the way of the actual renewal of the ANC. Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci’s interregnum notion fits this limping crowd. The old refused to bow out, and the young threatened their imminent presence.

Suppose Mantashe returns in December in any NOB sense. In that case, the ANC will be dead in the ballot context because he fits the dung beetle crowd and resembles everything wrong with the ANC despite the vociferous and cheap protests of renewal and self-correcting as advanced by this tired group of leaders. Who is pushing waste around in the seriousness of positional power?