President Cyril Ramaphosa enters this week’s ANC national general council with renewed assurances from the ANC leadership that he will serve out his full term.
This even as murmurs of a leadership shake-up and frustration over South Africa’s coalition government ripple through the governing party.
While the council does not elect leaders, it has historically been a political pressure valve at which frustrations can boil over and shape succession battles long before they formally begin.
Maropene Ramokgopa, the ANC’s second deputy secretary-general who is widely seen as aligned with Ramaphosa, said rumours of his imminent departure were a fiction because “no one has come up to talk about the issue of the president and steering us into a wrong direction”.
“People are more concerned about local government and …about if the GNU is the right [thing],” she said. “That’s all that people are talking about.”
To be held at the Birchwood Hotel in Boksburg, the national general council comes as the ANC probes an attempt to engineer Ramaphosa’s removal before he completes his term as party leader in 2027. The speculation has emerged amid disquiet in ANC structures over the government of national unity, formed after the party lost its outright majority in the 2024 general election for the first time since the end of apartheid.
Some delegates who spoke to Business Day before the gathering have signalled that partnering with the DA has tested ideological boundaries and weakened traditional alliances.
Ramokgopa acknowledged this internal tension. She said provinces in their respective provincial general councils before the national gathering have openly asked whether the ANC should not have partnered with the uMkhonto weSizwe party or the EFF instead “because those are our closest allies”.
“If the [national general council] says we don’t think that it is correct to continue with the GNU as it is … we will have to look at that.
“Because … the GNU was opened to MK and EFF. They said, ‘No, if you’re going to work with the others, then you don’t want to be part of it. It’s not like they were excluded.’
The ANC insists this national general council is simply a routine policy check-in and not a showdown over leadership. But Ramokgopa, also the minister in the presidency responsible for planning, monitoring & evaluation, knows from experience that these meetings can quickly turn heated.
“This is where the rift between the ANC Youth League and the ANC actually came into form … It was extremely hard,” she recalled of the ANC’s 2010 national general council, which featured party rifts over the nationalisation of mines.
Now, with the party shifting from leaders shaped by exile politics to a new generation with different priorities, she said tensions are inevitable.
“It is going to be a difficult thing … because it’s a change of an era,” she said.
Business Day
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