What the 2015 argument got right, where it was incomplete, and how factional patronage still shapes South Africa. 

China Dodovu’s article is posted below this rejoinder and is in italics.

Introduction.

Dodovu wrote when the ANC still governed nationally with a comfortable majority, and its internal conference seemed the decisive arena in which South Africa’s political future would be settled. That world has ended. The ANC now approaches its 2027 National Conference as a 40 per cent party in a Government of National Unity, while preparing for municipal elections that may further reduce its share of votes, councils, patronage and organisational confidence. The question is no longer only who succeeds Cyril Ramaphosa. It is whether the succession process will help the ANC recover public legitimacy—or turn an electoral crisis into another contest among provincial machines, office-seekers and financiers.

Written before the ANC’s 54th National Conference at Nasrec, ANC Member of Parliament China Dodovu’s August 2015 article – “The ANC Premier League: wearing a dress to advance a nefarious agenda” – can now be read in light of the outcome of the succession contest, in which Cyril Ramaphosa narrowly defeated Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma by 2,440 votes to 2,261. From the vantage point of the present, it was more than an intervention in a leadership contest. It was an early diagnosis of how provincial power, state patronage and factional organisation were being consolidated into a national political machine.

Where Dodovu was prescient

Dodovu’s strongest claim was that the “Premier League” was not an isolated caucus but a symptom of a deeper patronage order. Events vindicated that warning. The succession campaign became a struggle between networks able to mobilise provinces, branches, leagues, public authority and access to resources. At Nasrec, Ramaphosa won the presidency, but the outcome did not amount to a clean defeat of the opposing network. David Mabuza became deputy president, Ace Magashule secretary-general and Jessie Duarte remained deputy secretary-general. The mixed Top Six embodied the balance of forces Dodovu had identified: one candidate could win while the organisational machinery associated with the rival coalition retained substantial power.

He was equally correct that invoking a woman president could be both principled and instrumentalised. The demand for gender equality was legitimate, overdue and constitutionally consonant. Yet the political test was whether women’s emancipation was being advanced as a programme of institutional transformation or deployed as protective language for an existing factional project. Dodovu’s formulation—support a woman president on principle, but do not permit patriarchal patronage networks to wear the dress of feminism—remains the article’s most compelling proposition.

Where the argument was incomplete

The article’s limitation was that it treated Ramaphosa mainly as the target of an unjust campaign, rather than as a political actor whose own coalition would also depend on money, provincial brokers, slate-making and elite compromise. His narrow victory did not abolish the transactional politics under criticism; it required accommodation with it. The celebrated succession convention that a deputy president should succeed the president was never a neutral constitutional rule. It was an internal norm invoked selectively, useful to Ramaphosa’s supporters precisely because it aligned institutional continuity with their preferred candidate.

Nor could Ramaphosa’s business history be dismissed simply as factional slander. The relevant question was not whether business experience disqualified him, but whether his presidency would alter South Africa’s political economy, rebuild state capability and improve the material position of the poor and working class. On those tests, the record is mixed. His administration restored some institutional credibility, strengthened parts of the state damaged during the state-capture era, and placed renewal and anti-corruption at the centre of public discourse. Yet implementation was slow, accountability uneven, economic growth weak and public services persistently unreliable. The promise of a “new dawn” collided with the ANC’s limited capacity—and sometimes limited willingness—to reform itself.

The growing discussion of Patrice Motsepe as a possible contender in the 2027 succession sharpens this unfinished part of Dodovu’s argument. Motsepe and Ramaphosa emerged from the same post-apartheid political economy in which politically connected black business leaders entered sectors long dominated by established capital. Both built formidable corporate profiles in mining and investment; they are also brothers-in-law. Those facts do not establish impropriety, nor do they disqualify either man from public leadership. They do, however, make the relationship between political authority, concentrated wealth, party funding and succession impossible to treat as incidental. African Rainbow Minerals’ disclosed financial support for the ANC further illustrates why Dodovu’s warning about business interests sponsoring political formations deserves renewed scrutiny—not as an allegation of a purchased candidacy, for which evidence would be required, but as a democratic demand for transparency about who finances power and what access that financing may create.

From the Premier League to dispersed factional power

The Premier League as a named formation did not survive intact, but its political method did. Provincial barons, tender-linked networks, branch manipulation, slate politics and the use of organisational office as a gateway to public power became portable practices. They migrated into rival camps, provincial contests, local-government coalitions and breakaway formations. The problem was therefore never only three premiers. It was an incentive system in which control of the party could unlock control of the state, and control of the state could reproduce control of the party.

This helps explain why Ramaphosa’s strategy of preserving ANC unity brought only temporary stability. He inherited a divided organisation and often governed through calibrated delay, consultation and compromise. That caution may have prevented an immediate rupture, but it also gave entrenched interests time to regroup. Eventually the rupture occurred outside the ANC’s formal structures. Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe Party converted a factional and regional revolt into an electoral force, winning 14.58 per cent nationally in 2024 and becoming the largest party in KwaZulu-Natal. What could not be resolved through internal renewal reappeared as external fragmentation.

The verdict of the electorate

The most consequential judgment came not from an ANC conference but from voters. The ANC fell from 57.5 per cent in 2019 to 40.18 per cent in the 2024 national election, securing 159 of 400 National Assembly seats and losing the majority it had held since 1994. The result cannot be attributed to one leader or one faction. It was an accumulated verdict on corruption, unemployment, inequality, failing municipalities, electricity insecurity, weak administration and the distance between liberation legitimacy and lived experience.

The Government of National Unity that followed is therefore both a repudiation and a continuation of the politics Dodovu described. It repudiates the assumption that an ANC internal contest alone determines the country’s future: power must now be negotiated across parties and exercised under sharper parliamentary scrutiny. Yet it also reproduces the politics of balancing blocs, distributing offices and managing contending centres of power. The decisive question is whether coalition bargaining will become a constitutional mechanism for accountability and reform, or merely a wider marketplace for patronage.

The road through 2026 to the ANC’s 2027 conference

With the 2027 ANC National Conference looming, Dodovu’s analysis is not a historical curiosity but a guide to the contest already taking shape. The municipal elections scheduled for 4 November 2026 will hinge on the Ramaphosa era and the succession battle. The direction of travel is adverse: the ANC fell below 50 per cent in the 2021 local elections, dropped to 40.18 per cent nationally in 2024, and now campaigns amid persistent failures of water, roads, electricity distribution, refuse removal and municipal administration. Ipsos has placed it at 31 per cent among registered voters, against 25 per cent for the DA, 14 per cent for MK and 11 per cent for the EFF. That poll is a snapshot rather than a forecast; turnout, ward-level contests and local candidate credibility will matter. But it does show that a further fall is no longer a remote warning—it is a plausible governing scenario around which the ANC’s factions are already positioning.

Three outcomes are possible. A limited retreat, with the ANC remaining near its 2024 share and retaining enough municipalities through coalitions, would let the national leadership argue that the decline has stabilised. A fall into the low-to-mid thirties, accompanied by the loss of leading-party status in additional metros, would turn the election into a vote of no confidence in the Ramaphosa settlement and strengthen demands for a dramatic change of face. A collapse towards or below 30 per cent would be existential: the ANC would approach 2027 not as a wounded governing party but as one at risk of losing its position as the country’s largest electoral formation. The third scenario would also shrink the municipal base from which branches, councillors and regional power brokers draw resources and influence, making the conference both more desperate and more susceptible to transactional mobilisation.

The geography of the result will matter as much as the national percentage. Further erosion in Gauteng would weaken the ANC’s urban claim and intensify battles over Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni. Continued marginalisation in KwaZulu-Natal would confirm MK as the principal vehicle of the Zuma-aligned rupture. Losses in the Eastern Cape, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Free State or North West would be more ominous still, because they would indicate that decline has travelled beyond the metros and into the provinces that continued to sustain the ANC in 2024. Each territorial setback would alter delegate arithmetic, provincial bargaining power and the credibility of those presenting themselves as rescuers in 2027.

The conference will therefore be a contest over competing explanations for decline. One bloc will blame weak implementation and offer managerial competence; another will blame ideological drift and the GNU; a third will present unity, money and market confidence as the prerequisites for recovery. Yet all three may reproduce Dodovu’s central concern if candidates are assembled through provincial bargains, benefactor networks and promises of access to office. Under electoral siege, “renewal” can easily become the public language of a private rearrangement of power.

Then there is Cde Paul Mashatile, the sitting Deputy President and, according to the ANC’s “so-called” succession culture, supposedly the heir apparent. His claim is not frivolous. He comes from the movement rather than the mining houses: a product of student activism, the UDF, the SACP, Gauteng’s provincial machinery and decades of party and government office. He has managed complex internal balances, served as Treasurer-General during a financially distressed period and reached the deputy presidency without presenting himself as the emissary of the economic establishment.

That organisational fluency, incumbency and knowledge of the branches give him advantages no opinion poll can confer. But no divine right of succession exists. The Gauteng network that propelled him nationally now presides over a province in which the ANC has suffered severe electoral decline; his support beyond familiar provincial alliances remains to be demonstrated; and public controversies concerning his associations and lifestyle—allegations he has disputed—complicate any claim that he embodies a clean break with the culture under examination. His low-key style may be read as disciplined coalition-building, or as an absence of a compelling national project.

This is the two-edged sword: Mashatile may not be a special-purpose vehicle of big capital, yet he risks appearing as the consummate product of the very party machinery Dodovu warned could marshal branches, benefactors and state office to install “their person” at all cost. If he seeks to inherit Ramaphosa’s office, he must do more than invoke the Deputy-President-succeeds-President convention or ride the midnight express of slate politics. He must explain why the ANC declined so sharply in its economic heartland under the watch of the political generation with which he is identified, disclose the interests surrounding his campaign, build credible support beyond Gauteng and prove—in the 2026 municipal battle, not through conference arithmetic alone—that he can recover public trust and renew the movement’s historic mission.

This is where a possible Motsepe candidacy provides the clearest contemporary parallel. Ramaphosa was once defended against the claim that his passage from political leadership into business made him an instrument of capital. A decade later, another wealthy mining and investment figure is being discussed as a “unity” or stabilising candidate. Motsepe has repeatedly distanced himself from party-political ambition. Still, the PM27 campaign has nevertheless developed national and provincial coordinating structures and has linked its current work to strengthening the ANC before the municipal elections. That sequence is politically revealing: electoral repair becomes the platform for succession mobilisation. At the same time, a prospective candidate’s wealth, corporate credibility and distance from day-to-day party conflict are offered as evidence of rescue capacity.

But public popularity is not the same as command of an ANC conference. Delegates come from branches, regions, and provinces, not national opinion polls. A Motsepe project would therefore still need the machinery that Dodovu warned about, or an alliance with those who control it. The same applies to candidates who emerge from the existing Top Seven. Thus the decisive 2027 distinction will not be between an “insider” and an “outsider”, or between politics and business. It will be between a candidate bound by transparent institutional reform and one carried into office by an opaque compact of provinces, money and prospective appointments.

What Dodovu’s argument means today

Dodovu was right in diagnosis but only partly right in prescription. Political education and disciplinary action are necessary, but they cannot by themselves defeat factionalism when the material rewards of office remain so large, and the institutions regulating appointments, procurement and party finance remain vulnerable. Renewal requires enforceable rules: transparent political funding, merit-based public appointments, professional municipal administration, credible consequence management, protected investigative institutions and democratic internal processes that cannot be bought or loaded.

The deeper lesson is that South Africa’s crisis was never reducible to a choice between Ramaphosa and Dlamini-Zuma. The 2017 contest personalised a structural struggle over the relationship between party, state and capital. Ramaphosa’s victory changed the balance within that system without fully transforming it. The Premier League lost its original coherence, but the political economy that produced it continued to shape appointments, alliances, resistance to accountability and electoral realignment.

The ANC might enter 2027 with no safe inheritance left to distribute.

Its majority would, arguably and potentially, gone. Its municipal foundations will be vulnerable, and its next leader will inherit a coalition-bound state and an electorate no longer persuaded by liberation memory alone. Dodovu’s warning therefore returns with greater force: the danger is not simply that a faction may capture the conference, but that the conference may mistake factional rearrangement for renewal. If the municipal elections deliver another southward turn, changing the face at the top—whether to a party insider, a provincial broker or a billionaire unity candidate—will not reverse decline unless the ANC changes the system below. The next conference can choose a successor, or it can choose institutional reform. If it chooses only a successor, the voters will choose the ANC’s future for it.

 

THE DODOVU ARTICLE (AS PUBLISHED AND CIRCULATED).

THE ANC PREMIER LEAGUE: WEARING A DRESS TO ADVANCE A NEFARIOUS AGENDA – BY CHINA DODOVU

20 August 2015

Since the clock is ticking fast towards the ANC’s 54th National Conference in 2017 and most recently, after the ANC Women’s League National Conference, some unsavoury concerns are being raised about the candidature of Cde Cyril Ramaphosa to succeed Cde Jacob Zuma as the ANC President and thereafter of South Africa in 2019 when the ANC wins the general elections again. 

These concerns range from questioning his political background to his capabilities to fulfill its historic mission and strategic objective of creating a united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous society. In some quarters, Cde Cyril is repudiated and ridiculed as a special purpose vehicle that perpetuates and drives a white neo-liberal agenda in congruence with the global capitalist interests.

 It is quite confusing to establish the actual motive for these “sudden concerns” because those who moot the debate present a troubling paradox or a two-edge sword by trying to exterminate and liquidate his political career and drive him into political oblivion. 

On the one hand is a debate whether South Africa is ready to be led by a woman President and on the other is a lingering statement attributed to him since 1996 that “I depart from the business of politics to the politics of business” which purportedly paints him as a petty bourgeois who is more sussed to big business and less concerned to the aspirations of the poor and the working. 

If these concerns are triggered by the former then they are not only fraught with ambivalence and opportunism but equally those who seek “their person” at all cost, are acting like predators at the smell of blood, capitalizing on his fragility. 

These “concerns” are also misplaced and unprincipled because electing a woman President now or in the future, cannot be used as a pliable instrument and easy way to demotivate or question Cde Cyril’s candidature. They also conveniently ignore the “so-called” ANC Presidency succession culture. i.e. Deputy President succeeds President. 

The recent ANCWL conference has sent a cogent message that needs no other interpretation: “ANC Woman President in 2017”. As the ANCWL leaders were crafting their future in the conference, they were resolute in their conviction to sustain the heritage of its forebears built over decades by successive generations of women leaders to create a non-sexist society, and resolving to elect the next ANC President as a woman must have been a giant leap towards that direction. 

In a patriarchal society such as ours where women are daily exposed to harsh socio-economic and political hardships, there is a compelling case to advance to the majestic heights, a cause for non-sexism, gender parity and women empowerment with vigour and vitality. 

Electing a woman President must not be a symbolic gesture to advance their cause but it must be seen in a context of sustaining the proud heritage of women struggles in this country and as a shibboleth to realize the goals of women emancipation, as the saying goes: “Malibongwe, igama la Makhosikazi and Mmangwana o tshwara thipa kafa bogaleng”. 

But if South Africans particularly women feel that they are ready to be led by a woman at the helm, it must be underpinned by correct principles and unflinching resoluteness to do so and Cde Cyril’s “sudden unsuitability” to ascend to the throne must not be used as a scapegoat. 

What is worrisome is this crusade to instal a woman President is the underhand tactics of the so-called Premier League. If the reports received are anything to go by, then the Premier League is an epitome, a manifestation, a tip of the iceberg of factionalism of grand-style within the ANC. 

As an inter-provincial clique with national footprints, Premier League is a pinnacle of all factions the ANC has ever experienced because of its modus operandi, connections and the weight of the state resources it continue to amass and splash. It is one example that is so glaring in our face because it represents that statement of spitting in the face of struggling women in order to advance its devious, nefarious agenda. 

In the discussion document entitled “Contextual Considerations in Addressing the Challenges of Leadership” (2007) authored by Cdes Joel Netshitenzhe, Enock Godongwana and Mandla Nkomfe, they specify new tendencies which are manifesting in the ANC: “these include the danger of using positions with power of patronage to suppress debate or for individuals to censor themselves and hide their own individual views to please ‘seniors’, corrupt practices which include “buying” of ANC membership cards, to load conferences with “voting cattles”, business interests sponsoring candidates so as corruptly to benefit when “their people” are in government, and an intense display of factionalism and even tribalism especially when government positions are at stake”. 

The Premier League represents those tendencies referred to in that 2008 discussion document and is becoming a formidable foe and a infectious rhythm that is determined to repeat itself in the coming ANC Youth League National Congress to punt for leadership positions in preparation for 2017 Conference. It operates as a midnight express, convening secret meetings and speaking poorly about leaders it dislikes. Who is saying the battle for 2017 has not started? 

The members of the Premier League are political appointees as heads of provinces, appointed to these posts because they didn’t only delivered the 2012 Mangaung victory while purging opponents along the way but they are also part of a “political dynasty” which is consumed by hunger for more: more power, more prestige, more glory and more money.

 To say that Premier League is only part of a problem is to tell the truth. It is just one part of a vast system of cronyism, degeneracy, nepotism and greed which is fast manifesting. Looking at it in its totality, it is a reflection of a lot that is going wrong within the ANC’s body politic. 

So while we rightly condemn Premier League’s self-seeking sycophancy, mala fides intentions and calling them names, we risk missing the forest for the trees. Premier League is a product of a deeply rotten patronage system that rewards political loyalty and pays no regard to merit or competence. 

In the same vein, as the ANCWL prepares for its future, its current leaders must sustain its proud heritage, connect with its history and “disconnect” with the Premier League. They cannot destroy what was built through blood and sweat, life and limb in fighting for women emancipation. This generation must reaffirm a sense of continuity in terms of advancing and upholding its heritage to realize non-sexism in our society. Surely, these struggles cannot be contaminated by Premier League. 

Preceding its national conference, some of the ANCWL events were haunted by images where some women were openly pulling down and throwing their underpants in elective conferences. These were not a pretty sight that would make their forebears proud. 

Undoubtedly, those pandemoniums portrayed a picture of a party at war with itself. During its future conferences including when the ANCWL lobby for woman President, it cannot entrapped itself deeper into these scandalous quagmire of ignominy. 

The Premier League’s factionalism must be exiled in the ANC. Its members must check their “speed limit” as the ANC is endowed with a rich culture and traditions which have sustained it for more than 103 years. 

But also, factionalism will not be eliminated by shouting insults against it. The best or worst shout against factionalism, whatever its form, size and shape, is to deal decisively with its exponents through firm disciplinary processes and rigorous political education programs.