Death threats, court case mark battle for South Africa’s ANC

Bloomberg

Death threats and court challenges mark an intensifying battle for control of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress as factions fight it out in the nation’s provinces before the party elects a new leader to replace Jacob Zuma.
In the region with the most ANC members, KwaZulu-Natal, the high court is expected to rule next month on an application by party officials to overturn an 2015 election of provincial leaders allied with Zuma following what they say was a flawed process. In Free State, deputy party chairman Thabo Manyoni is seeking to replace his boss, Ace Magashule, another supporter of the president who’s led the ANC in the province for 23 years.
Whoever wins the battles will go to the December ANC leadership conference as the favorites to determine South Africa’s political future. Supporters of Zuma, who steps down as the nation’s president in 2019, are campaigning for former African Union Commission Chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the president’s ex-wife, to take over the party. Manyoni and officials behind the court challenge in KwaZulu-Natal are backing the other main contender, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.
“If the outcome of the 2015 election is overturned, it would be a major, major fight and could turn things around, away from Zuma’s ANC, and therefore away from Dlamini-Zuma’s campaign,” said Susan Booysen, a political science professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Governance in Johannesburg. “The court case is a major decider, not just for the ANC but for South Africa’s future elections.”
Manyoni, 57, says the bitterness surrounding his campaign for Free State’s most powerful political position shows what is at stake. “There are death threats,” Manyoni, a former ANC guerrilla fighter who wears a Che Guevara cap, said in an interview. “I’m not going to back off; the ANC is the only home I know. When I fought the apartheid forces during that time, I knew I might not see tomorrow.”
Victory by Manyoni in elections set for next month would be seen as evidence of the disintegration of a group known as the Premier League that consists of the leaders of Free State and two other rural provinces and has helped keep Zuma in power and backed Dlamini-Zuma’s leadership campaign. Yet, whether he can defeat a skillful political operator like Magashule is doubtful, according to some political analysts.