The Limpopo and Eastern Cape votes at the 2027 ANC National Elective Conference will be decisive about who becomes ANC President. In fact, the old Transvaal ANC is strongly emerging as the new kingmaker. Kwa-Zulu Natal has lost its luckstre, Gauteng is diffused into the old Transvaal forces, and all other provinces continue to have contributory significance. Desperate ANC president wannabes who missed reading this script are left teetering on the edge of political deracination. 

Starting a campaign to be ANC president is a decision to become a national node of influence. It is about subjecting yourself, family, friends, and your resources to one of the most brutal public scrutinies. You become the news. You become a measure of society, your party, and ultimately the country. 

Fighting for ANC presidency-linked political influence in RSA has, as the ultimate prize, the acquisition of state power, being the head of the national executive, and presiding over one of the 30 big economies in the world. Beyond what your political party will entrust to you as its manifesto, your person must be of a calibre that inspires confidence in society. You become the standard through which your first citizen status will be measured. 

A common risk in leadership selection through a party or country popular vote is the inability of the system to filter chaff from what is available. When the bar of those available to enter the race is compromised, the requirements to select the best veer off from serving the higher strategic, economic, and political purpose of leading a complex society like South Africa. 

In an organisation where criteria for leadership are uncompromisingly linked with supporting the heroic feats of those who braved to challenge the colonial and apartheid system, the standard of who is equal to the post-liberation tasks can become blurred. Political rhetoric, confused with the leadership task of leading a post-liberation South Africa, might stubbornly refuse to give way to key strategic challenges South Africa should be dealing with. 

Fortunately for us, the founding fathers who crafted the democratic order through the 1990-1996 political settlement and the Constitution drew a line around what the leadership function should be about. The establishment of a democratic, open society based on social justice, human rights, and unity in diversity, recognising that South Africa belongs to all who live in it

To lead South Africa, and therefore its influential political organisations, especially the ANC, should be about delivering the liberation promise in the Constitution. Starting a new history chapter and not being nostalgic about the achievements of previous generations that will forever be greater than current ones should distinguish the worth of newer breeds of leadership. B

Too often, and almost always before elective conferences of the ANC, South Africa is subjected to loud and empty rhetoric from dependent leaders who are overrating themselves as being suited to lead our complex constitutional and democratic order. The question we should be asking ourselves, after seeing the sober and dignified conduct of the Limpopo delegates in confirming a pathway for the next phase of the democratic journey, is what or who is best for South Africa. Only in Limpopo do we see that a renewal process is underway. 

Contrasting the Limpopo experience with the almost normalised behaviour of other provinces, it is becoming clear how far certain structures of the leaders of society are from understanding the new demands of leadership. The “siphata ngoku” generation is relentless in its quest to lead, without due regard to its limitedness and shallow substance. 

Without any brief to any of those who raised their hands, one of the emerging and dignified, notwithstanding the relentless drive to rubbish it, is the Paul Mashatile quest for leadership. Its opaqueness is fading. What Mashatile represents is starting to advance to the fore. 

His track record in ANC leadership provides an essential base of the political gravity South Africa needs to rejuvenate itself. The post-Polokwane feudatories are collapsing under the logic of unity his campaign represents. 

Not much of an intellectual, yet a pragmatist, Mashatile’s ANC conservatism and social democracy have thus far displayed fervent concern for organisation and discipline essential for renewing and strengthening the liberation movement. A reluctant nationalist, yet an avowed grounded believer of a nation-state South Africa, Mashatile is a thread that can connect the disjointed generations of the ANC, and South Africa as a non-racialism project. 

The Limpopo smooth transition, a province that is inarguably embracing his quest for ANC leadership, is yet another testament, after being part of the 2017 ‘Unity-Unity’ brigade, of his compete-while-unifying prowess. At a time when South Africa needs a strong state as a binding agent for the loose sheet of sand it has become, liberty without unity, the rise of a strong leader like him within the ANC should be the cement the country gets. ANC orthodoxy that Mashatile is thus far representing might be the bonding agent the disjointed nationalisms of South Africa need. 

Mashatile, as a Ramaphosa successor, will be ideal to continue with the ANC’s ideological reckoning that society progresses through the adjustment of economic interests rather than clashes. Class tensions, as the three decades of ANC-alone governance demonstrated, are not the cause of social progress, but an inevitable outcome of such progress. Notwithstanding the mentioning of his name amongst those in the dock at the courts of ‘manufactured public opinion’, Mashatile could continue with the ‘destruct-to-construct’ approach of Ramaphosa towards corruption.

Unlike the other president-wannabes, Mashatile already has one foot into the presidency. He is a node of continuity the country can hook its hopes on. Once loosened, the nationalist within the Congress tradition in him will revive the nation that we are all yearning for. This might be the prize for him in the political contest.