It’s cold outside the ANC;” this is the disconsolate swansong of many an excommunicated cadre of the glorious ‘broad church’ that is the African National Congress. Who could blame them, a bulk of whom had been spared the plagues of the lumpen proletariat and chaperoned straight into the excesses of the elite ‘Afristocracy’ post-’94. Unable to come to terms with life outside the blue convoys and vintage Merlots, many who had deflected to breakaways like the Congress of the People (COPE), would eventually say sorry, wailing for their jobs back in Khongolose.
Not so for Mr Elias “Ace” Magashule.
Following his suspension in March 2021, murmurs of a brutal fightback, or a fractured NEC where open revolt would consume the party from within, were on the lips of the chattering class. Emboldened by Cyril Ramaphosa’s slim victory at the 54th National Conference in 2017, the possibility of a mutiny was not amiss on Bra Yster. This would explain the axed secretary-general’s attempts at undermining his political senior as well as eschewing to ‘tow the party line’ at every turn.
Addressing branches in KZN in January 2018, he asked for cool tempers as he assured unhappy cadres that Ramaphosa would enjoy no more than five years as party president. Reading from an imaginary memo, he also went on to tell a press conference that the ANC sought “a review of the [Reserve Bank’s] mandate and mooted the possibility of quantitative easing to tackle intergovernmental debt;” purportedly suspended the first citizen for suspending him, before finally resolving on a path – following his expulsion in June – many said he always aimed to pursue – of announcing his own party just two months later.
In upbeat spirits, unemployment has clearly done little to dampen the founder of the African Congress for Transformation’s (ACT) mood as he sat down to an interview on Podcast and Chill this passed month. In fashionable apparel, Bra Yster was a case study in what cool, calm and collected looks like even as law enforcement agencies are asking tough questions at your door and former comrades are giving you the cold shoulder.
Still, neither the R255m failed asbestos project case that hangs over his head, nor the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) sniffing around the bursary programme run out of his office in his day as premier of the Free State, or the damning allegations which that cheeky investigative journalist Pieter-Louis Myburgh lays out in his book Gangster State – a publication that had the ANC in the Free State up in arms – could make him quiver in his boots.
“I did not have to look hard,” Myburgh says of Magashule, “to discover that his version of his struggle history is replete with half-truths, ample embellishment and a few outright lies.” Amongst Magashule’s many illustrious claims to Struggle icon see him as a founding member of the Congress of South African Students and establishing the United Democratic Front in the Free State. Not quite, Myburgh disputes, and Popo Molefe, chairperson of Transnet, goes as far as to call Magashule a liar on this.
Nonetheless, our man remains eager for the charges he stands accused of to play themselves out so the light may fall on the shadowy dealings of power and reveal those traitors who have been carefully sharpening the long knives behind his back all along.
A cocksure Magashule then guides the podcast’s viewers on an idyllic excursion of his Struggle achievements which again place him in an assortment of key upheavals of those turbulent times. There’s a lot of name dropping – everything from hanging out with the lates Beyers Naude and Peter Mokaba; charged with high treason (Myburgh says it was a charge of public violence) whilst at the University of Fort Hare; training with the ANC’s military wing, MK; even a stint with The Cradock Four; mobilising with unionists COSATU; nine months in solitary confinement … the list is a doorstop.
And if we are to take Magashule at his word, former presidents Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma had earmarked him for the Free State premiership as early as 1994 but he says he ‘declined’ as he was still too young for the immensity of the position. The position would go to Mosioua ‘Terror’ Lekota. Myburgh further writes that in 1999, just when it looked like Magashule would take up his anointed premiership role, “Mbeki dashed these hopes.” “Mbeki, who clearly shared Mandela’s reservations about Magashule…[appointed] … Winkie Direko.” Feeling snubbed, Magashule is said to have then gone out of his way to make the lives of both Direko, as well as her successor, the late Beatrice Marshoff, very difficult.
More recently, however, and despite the soured relations, Magashule insists that in the face of warnings from both the communists and workers against bringing Ramaphosa – ‘a bourgeois’ – into the ANC deputy presidency back at Mangaung 2012, he was resolute and did it anyway. But in 2017, he admits to having had a change of heart, throwing his lot with the so-called NDZ slate in preference of Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to the CR17’s billionaire candidate.
For this, he cites ideological differences. “The DA [Democratic Alliance] is the historical enemy,” he says, “so if we have to work, why can’t we work with the EFF [Economic Freedom Fighters] …we share the same policies…we share the same constituency; blacks in general Africans in particular.”
As a result, he suggests, that whites are generally wary of his radical variant of the ANC but welcome Ramaphosa’s moderate version with open wallets. On this score he makes a profound assertion: the ANC is captured and Ramaphosa answers to white superiors in the form of the so-called Stellenbosch Mafia. Also, his gripe is around funds – that money ultimately paved the way for Ramaphosa’s presidential ascent. On the issue of Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala saga Bra Yster invokes an Orwellian Animal Farm analogy; that the new South Africa has people who are simply untouchable.
Bra Yster would also have us believe that he’s been nothing but a cadre in good standing and a hard-working servant of the people. Across the Free State, he claims to have paved and tarred innumerable roads. During his time, he boasts, potholes were non-existant. When cramped 40 square metre house were being built for the poor in his province, he found this highly unacceptable, deciding eventually to put them into bigger 50 square metre abodes, even though Myburgh says that during the nine years of Magashule’s premiership the auditor-general showed ‘that the [Human Settlements] department incurred irregular expenditure totalling a jaw-dropping R7 billion.’ Although there are those who sometimes refer to him as Mr Ten Percent, – denoting that he has been allegedly known to seek ten percent from the province’s public tenders – Magashule says his hands are clean and he has received ‘no cent from any company.’
Gangster State is replete with all manner of searing allegations being put at Magashule’s door – too many to cramp into one article. So we’d recommend the reader getting their hands on the book (available at the Mongezi Juda Library in Kuyasa).
As for the upcoming elections, Magashule is confident ‘we are going to do very well.’ They’ll not only win the Free State, he says, but also Northern Cape and the North West, home to his staunch ally in what was then known as The Premier’s League, Supra Mohumapelo. He also foresees having a foothold in Gauteng and the Eastern Cape and does not dismiss the possibility of working with other ‘progressive forces’ should the ACT find itself in parliament. What he does, however, vehemently reject is the insinuation that he has always been eyeing the presidency desirously. ‘I’m not even aiming to become president,’ he says, ‘I just want to serve.’
In the main, Magashule believes that white monopoly capitalists have been hovering on the wings, meticulously planning to maintain the status quo of white dominance since Madiba’s release from prison, and, in Ramaphosa, have found an amiable yes-man. He is further concerned that ‘white parties are coming together [and] deliberately establishing splinter black parties.’ By his assessment, ensembles like ActionSA and the mushrooming new black parties are nothing other than an invisible white hand deliberately set to play ‘divide and conquer.’ He wishes that all black parties would converge under a single umbrella because by his reckoning the forthcoming election is ‘wafa wafa’ – do or die – and ‘if we miss it this time as blacks and Africans in particular, forget, our country will go forever.’
It would seem that this is the Pan-Africanist backbone that informs, amongst others, the ACT, EFF, and PAC. In the meanwhile, the ACT still aims to consult with ‘the people’ on policy and a way forward and although there have been talks with the EFF, Magashule says he was not interested in joining the Red Brigade.
Be that as it may, the ‘white and foreign threat’ are posed to be major talking points in the forthcoming ballot. As previously written, ActionSA and Operation Dudula have been quick out the starting blocks on immigration. Racial paranoia remains so intimately etched to the social fabric that it would be remiss to imagine that it won’t be making its characteristic feature. On the other side, RISE Mzansi aims to reconfigure what is considered a pejorative term as they posture themselves as a party where being a ‘clever black’ … ‘is a gift to be celebrated, harnessed, and protected.’
In another bizarre twist, former Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng has come out to say that God has told him three times that the ex-jurist will be president of SA someday. According to Mogoeng the Almighty said, “he doesn’t want it to happen through an electoral process, he doesn’t want me join a political party. He doesn’t want me to form any political party. It is going to be miraculous.”
Whether after such divine pronouncements voters will still remember the lanky ex-footballer from Parys (who has been known to hand out wads of cash on the campaign trail) fondly enough to entrust him with their vote remains to be seen. But it would appear that the Magashule everyone thought was done for has been holding an ace up his sleeve.