Cape Town — A South African liberation fighter turned business tycoon has challenged the opaque leadership selection processes of the ruling African National Congress ahead of its choice of a new party leader later this year.
Mosima Gabriel ("Tokyo") Sexwale last week declared in as public a fashion as is possible in South Africa – on the evening television news – his availability for election as the ANC's, and therefore South Africa's, next president. The ANC is scheduled to hold leadership elections at its five-yearly conference in December.
Conventional wisdom is that an ANC member who discusses a candidacy in public thereby rules himself or herself out of contention. In ANC tradition, leaders do not, at least publicly, vie for office. Instead, they pronounce themselves loyal and disciplined party members who await "deployment" to wherever the party most needs them, while lobbying goes on behind the scenes.
It was thus a surprise when Sexwale began appearing on television to answer questions about the possibility of standing for election in place of Thabo Mbeki, currently president of both the party and the country.
His success in upending party orthodoxy became apparent when the SABC, South Africa's public broadcaster, picked up on the news. In its political coverage, the SABC has become the kind of stodgy state broadcaster which often places the president's activities at the top of its bulletins, irrespective of news value and sometimes despite appalling sound reproduction when camera crews fail to place a microphone on a podium.
Sexwale was not so crass as to tell the SABC he was running; he said merely that he had been approached and that he would have to hear more on why party members wanted him to stand. The interview went to the top of the news, followed by a list of five other supposed candidates.
Sexwale is one of South Africa's more flamboyant public figures. He was recruited to the ANC underground by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in the early 1970s, went for military training in the former Soviet Union and was infiltrated back into the country in the aftermath of the Soweto youth uprising in June 1976.
Although the ANC had sent between 800 and 1,000 recruits for military training abroad in the decade since the jailing of Nelson Mandela, within South Africa "there wasn't a shot fired in anger," in the words of South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo. Sexwale inflicted the first injuries on government forces when he threw a hand grenade at police while entering South Africa from Swaziland. He was caught, went on trial and was lucky to escape the death penalty. He was sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment and dispatched to join Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners on Robben Island, off Cape Town.
Released from prison in 1990, he rose to prominence in the ANC, becoming chairman of the party in Gauteng, the province which forms South Africa's economic heartland. After liberation in 1994, he became the first premier of Gauteng, then went into business. A newspaper last year listed his investments as worth R978 million (U.S.$143 million), but informal estimates place it at as much as R6 billion.
"Tokyo" Sexwale – his first name derives from his interest in karate as a youth – has been as colourful a businessman as he was a politician. His life includes a charming love story – his wife, Judy van Vuuren, was a white paralegal whom he met when she was sent to Robben Island by her law firm to help political prisoners. (While premier, Sexwale was voted by white women on a phone-in radio show as "South Africa's sexiest politician.")
He has brought a form of Grand Prix motor racing to South Africa, and practises philanthropy in the style of the Rockefellers, with whom he maintains contact (although he was once refused a visa by the U.S. government when he wanted to attend the listing of a gold mining company on the New York Stock Exchange). Late last month his family sent its executive jet to Maputo to airlift for treatment in Johannesburg a number of Mozambican children injured in recent ammunition dump explosions.
Sexwale also presided over the SABC's version of the American television show, "The Apprentice," becoming South Africa's Donald Trump (without the hair). However, in the tradition of South Africa's philosophy of "ubuntu" (humaneness), he was judged as not being a tough enough boss: when the final two contestants in the show went to be told who would get a job with his business empire, he refused to choose between them and appointed both.
No matter how attractive a public figure he is, whether Sexwale can pull the votes of the ANC's party congress in December is open to question. The SABC's list of potential candidates, reflecting recent journalistic speculation, included party heavyweights who have drawn more votes than Sexwale at past party conferences.
One name on the SABC's list of six was Thabo Mbeki, reportedly favoured by his home province of the Eastern Cape for a third term as party leader. Since South Africa's constitution bars him from another term as head of state, re-electing him would involve nominating a second, more junior ANC leader to be president of the country – the wisdom of which is bound to be vigorously debated within the ANC.
Mbeki's prospects would also be adversely affected by the bitterness of the struggle in the past two years around his party deputy, Jacob Zuma.
In the normal course of events, Zuma should have been the automatic choice to succeed Mbeki. Born in rural Zululand, he was one of the ANC's first generation of liberation fighters and served for 10 years on Robben Island, went into exile and eventually became the movement's intelligence chief. The ANC credits him with a leading role in combatting the internecine violence between ANC supporters and the followers of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi in the province of kwaZulu-Natal in the 1990s.
Zuma's prospects were severely damaged, however, when his financial adviser was jailed in 2005 on charges of corruption and fraud in a case in which he was named. Mbeki fired him as deputy president of the country. He is now South Africa's rough equivalent of Nigeria's Vice President Atiku Abubakar - mired in allegations about his financial dealings, with his angry supporters accusing the president of plotting against him.
Prosecutors are still considering bringing charges against Zuma, and in recent weeks his public relations adviser has been reduced to trying to explain his lawyers' strenuous efforts to keep evidence out of the courts. His chances for election will likely suffer a terminal blow if he is charged and has either been convicted or is still on trial when the conference convenes.
Sexwale is one of four on the list of six who are leaders of a younger generation of ANC leaders, all of whom to a greater or lesser degree cut their political teeth in the black consciousness movement established by Steve Biko and other young intellectuals in the universities in the late 1960s.
One of the four is Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, currently South Africa's foreign minister and the only woman on the list. She was a medical student at the University of Natal, where Biko also studied, in the early 1970s. Her party biography says that at the time "she was working underground for the ANC and above ground for the [black consciousness-oriented] South African Students' Organisation" (SASO). She has a reputation for effectiveness in the party, although she makes no apparent attempt to develop a public persona.
The most senior of the four in the ANC hierarchy is Mosiuoa ("Terror") Lekota, the party chairman and currently defence minister. He became SASO's full-time organiser while at university and was one of the black consciousness leaders jailed on Robben Island at the end of the principal political show trial of the mid-1970s. In prison, he was attracted by the non-racial ideals of ANC leaders and when he was later sentenced to a second term on Robben Island, it was as a leader of the ANC-aligned United Democratic Front.
Lekota gained his nickname, Terror, not for the feelings he engendered in whites but for his skills on the soccer field – he actually charmed Afrikaners after liberation when he served as premier of the Free State, the province initially founded as one of the independent Boer republics of the 19th century.
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The potential candidate who has come closest to the presidency in the past is Cyril Ramaphosa, who is now also a millionaire businessman but whose early rise to power was as a trade unionist.
Ramaphosa was detained in the 1970s for his work as a black consciousness movement organiser. However he made his name later, by organising South Africa's mineworkers. Forced to live in single-sex, military-style barracks under the control of the mining houses, the workers were notoriously difficult to unionise. Over a decade beginning in 1982, Ramaphosa helped to establish a union and then build it into one of the most potent forces in the country with a membership of 300,000.
When the ANC was unbanned, Ramaphosa had neither served time on Robben Island nor been in exile. Despite that, his popularity catapulted him into the post of ANC secretary general in 1991, and his bargaining skills made him the movement's lead negotiator in the talks which brought about democracy in 1994. When Nelson Mandela had to select a deputy, the choice was between Thabo Mbeki and Ramaphosa. He chose Mbeki. Ramaphosa declined a cabinet post and, once South Africa's final constitution was adopted, left parliament and went into business. His personal fortune has been listed at R490-million, but it has been estimated that it may actually be double that.
If Ramaphosa were to be persuaded to run, as a wealthy capitalist he would face, like Sexwale, ideologically-based opposition from within the party and its union and communist allies. However, there is no candidate – either among or outside the six named by the SABC – who will not face strong opposition from one or other grouping in the movement.
So at this stage, the race looks wide open. Apart from the six listed by the SABC, there is also speculation around the names of South Africa's highly successful finance minister, Trevor Manuel, and the current party secretary general, Kgalema Motlanthe. Whatever Tokyo Sexwale's prospects, his high profile intervention in the debate over South Africa's next leader seems set to reconfigure it.
