The ghost of North West ANC strongman Supra Mahumapelo loomed large at the party’s 9th elective conference this week, as the former premier embarked in legal warfare in his last minute bid to collapse the gathering.
At the time of going to press, the conference had experienced major delays as Mahumapelo still intended to interdict the whole gathering and have his former provincial executive committee (PEC) reinstated to organise the conference afresh.
On Friday night, Mahumapelo and his supporters won the first round of the legal battle, succeeding to block members of the Interim Provincial Committee (IPC) from voting at the conference. The IPC is controlled by allies of President Cyril Ramaphosa.
By yesterday afternoon, Mahumapelo had made his intentions of launching another legal challenge clear – this time around interdicting the whole conference. Mahumapelo was accused of applying every trick in the book to collapse the meeting, with his detractors saying he did not have enough numbers to re-emerge as the provincial chairperson.
It was a high stakes game for Mahumapelo, who has been at the centre of North West politics for over a decade.
The “Black Jesus”, as some of his supporters prefer to call him, rose back to lead the province in 2011, after his PEC was disbanded in 2008. At some point, Mahumapelo and his allies were accused of being behind the launch of the North West chapter of the Congress of the People in 2009.
Mahumapelo was a supporter of former president Thabo Mbeki at the time. He has survived all the storms and is now the face of the so-called Radical Economic Transformation forces in the North West and a staunch Jacob Zuma supporter.
The North West current conference is one of the most contested conferences in recent memory, due to the deep divisions in the province.
An average of eight candidates are vying for each of the top five positions. But the main battleground was the position of the chairperson between Mahumapelo and the reigning premier Bushy Maape.
For Mahumapelo, it is a do-or-die battle as he tries to save his political career and resuscitate his political relevance, while Maape knows too well that a defeat would cost him his premiership position – as was the case with Sihle Zikalala who was forced out of his position as premier immediately after losing the chairmanship of the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal.
For many years, Mahumapelo has been a polarising figure in the province, whose PEC has been disbanded several times, and has had parallel structures set up in the fight for the soul of the organisation.
It seems like a lifetime ago when three powerful men Ace Magashule, David Mabuza and Mahumapelo, then referred to as the “Premier League” appeared impenetrable in the ANC. The then three bedfellows, previously all premiers of their respective provinces and provincial chairpersons of the ANC, were seen as king makers in the lead up to the party’s elective conference in 2017.
Magashule ran a tight ship in the Free State. Mabuza and Mahumapelo had their way in Mpumalanga and the Free State respectively. In them, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma saw men who will deliver her to the top position of the ANC, to succeed Jacob Zuma.
This, until Mabuza apparently threw his lot with Cyril Ramaphosa at the last minute at the party’s last national elective conference held in Nasrec, Johannesburg in 2017.
It was not all lost for the Zuma faction, however, as Magashule got the powerful position of secretary-general, the engine room of the ruling party. That was until the resolutions of the 2017 Nasrec conference came back to bite him, and he was later suspended and forbidden to contest for any leadership commission until he sorted out his legal issues.
Just months after the watershed conference, a spate of service delivery protests broke out in the North West with protestors asking that Mahumapelo be sacked. A month later (May 2018), Mahumapelo fell on his sword. This was not to be the end for Mahumapelo’s woes.
In August of 2018 ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) disbanded its provincial executive committee in the North West province following a special meeting.
Mahumapelo was out in the cold – forced to relinquish his chairperson position. Fast forward to April 2021, a provincial disciplinary committee of the ANC in the North West found Mahumapelo and ally, acting provincial ANC Women’s League secretary Bitsa Lekonpane, guilty on misconduct and suspended them from the party for five years.
In all his tribulations post-2017 conference, Mahumapelo has raised one man’s name as the figure behind his downfall, Maape.
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