waiting’, 32 and they were convinced that their man would finally get the nod from the ANC’s top brass.
But Thabo Mbeki, who took over from Mandela as ANC president in 1997, and as the man in charge of the country after the 1999 elections, dashed these hopes. Mbeki, who clearly shared Mandela’s reservations about Magashule, shocked the latter’s support base by appointing Botshabelo local and NCOP member Winkie Direko as premier.
Like Lekota and Matsepe-Casaburri before her, Direko was labelled by the Magashule camp as an outsider who had been imposed on the Free State by a national leadership that chose to ignore the wishes of its ground-level members. They went as far as calling her an ‘Mbeki appointee’, 33 signalling that the ANC infighting in the province would continue unabated.
But Direko was tough, and it quickly became clear that she would not be intimidated by those who refused to accept her authority.
‘Magashule made life difficult for Winkie, just as he had done with Terror and Ivy, but she did not take any nonsense from him,’ said a Free State politician who was in the trenches during those heady days of factional fighting.
By mid-2000, the ongoing conflict, which was driven in part by allegations that the 1998 provincial conference had been rigged, necessitated yet another drastic intervention from the ANC’s national leadership. The NWC disbanded the Magashule-led PEC and appointed an interim committee to lead the party in the province. 34
This body was led by Godfrey Mosala, a former official in the provincial education department, and Noby Ngombane, who was later shot dead in what is deemed to have been the most high-profile assassination as a result of the province’s political discord (see Chapter
8).
During the years of the interim committee’s reign, Magashule found his feet as an MP in Cape Town, where he was a member of Parliament’s portfolio committees on communications and provincial and local government. Judging by Hansard records, Magashule contributed to committee meetings from time to time, but his mind was no doubt consumed with thoughts of his inevitable comeback in his home province.
One source who was an MP in the National Assembly in those days said Magashule was often absent from Parliament because he was spending a lot of time in the Free State. ‘During some weeks, Ace would maybe attend committee meetings or sittings in Parliament on the Monday and the Tuesday, but on Wednesday he would hop on a plane and fly to Bloemfontein, where he would spend the rest of the week,’ said the source. ‘He knew he risked becoming weak in the Free State if he spent too much time outside the province, so he maintained his presence there.’
The opportunity for Magashule to once again grab hold of the ANC’s top position in the Free State presented itself in 2002, when the party was due to hold another provincial elective conference. Mbeki, of course, wanted Direko to become chair. Her name appeared on the ballot, but Magashule comfortably defeated her by about 100 votes.
Matosa, Magashule’s long-time ally, found himself elected to the position of provincial secretary.35 The victory marked the start of a fifteen-year run of nearly uninterrupted rule by Magashule as chairperson of the ANC in the Free State.
The ANC’s national leadership would again disband the Magashule-led Free State PEC in 2012, but this was yet another temporary
setback.
5
Free State capture and the ‘cattle thief’
The 2002 victory was crucial for Magashule’s subsequent dominance of party politics in the Free State, as well as his iron grip on the provincial government’s finances. ‘The Free State’s current troubles started in 2002,’ observed one of his former associates. ‘This is when Ace started to consolidate his power and when he started to mastermind his capture of every level of government in the province.’
Magashule and his followers first focused on gaining control of the municipalities. As ANC chairperson and chair of the party’s deployment committee, Magashule used his power and influence to ensure that ‘his people’ were appointed to key municipal positions all over the province, explained my source.
The most important positions were those of mayor and municipal manager. The Magashule-led PEC determined who the mayor of each municipality would be. And while the appointment of municipal managers was a prerogative of each municipality’s council, ANC
members who took instruction from the PEC dominated those councils.
The management tier that fell under the post of municipal manager was also stacked with Magashule allies. This included directors and chief financial officers (CFOs).
A former mayor from one of the Free State’s northern regions said he was axed in those years because he expressed his discomfort with how Magashule’s allies were being appointed as directors in his municipality. He was also opposed to how his municipality was dishing
out contracts to people associated with Magashule.
A second source, who later served as an MEC in Magashule’s cabinet, agreed that the capture process began in 2002. ‘There is a pattern of municipal managers appointed from 2002 who were from Fezile Dabi
[the district around Magashule’s hometown of Parys] or who were otherwise close to him,’ he said.
Two years after Magashule became provincial chairperson, his banishment to Cape Town came to an end. He returned to the Free State in 2004, where he briefly joined the provincial legislature as an MPL.
After the national election in April 2004, Mbeki appointed Beatrice Marshoff as the Free State’s new premier. Marshoff, who had been the MEC for social development in Direko’s cabinet, was apparently
‘shocked’ when Mbeki appointed her ahead of Magashule.1
It is unlikely that Magashule would have been similarly shocked by yet another snub from the party’s national leadership.
Marshoff said that Magashule and his cronies approached her right after she became premier. ‘We had a meeting at Kopano Nokeng [a lodge and conference centre outside Bloemfontein] where they cornered me with a list of demands for people they wanted me to appoint as MECs,’ she told me. ‘I said, “No, I’ll decide who is going to get appointed.”’ At that stage, she had no intention to include Magashule or any members of his clique in her government. ‘I had been warned by Terror [Lekota] how much time and energy it took to keep his [Magashule’s] trouble under control,’ Marshoff told me.
Nevertheless, in yet another attempt to try to heal the province’s festering political wounds, the national leadership asked Marshoff to
make room for Magashule.
It took quite an effort to convince the new premier. ‘I had sent my list of MECs to Mbeki, the SG [Kgalema Motlanthe] and the NEC, and it didn’t include the names of Magashule or Casca Mokitlane, one of Magashule’s allies whom that camp also wanted in the executive council,’ explained Marshoff.
Essop Pahad, who led the NEC’s provincial committee for the Free State, asked Marshoff if she would consider making room for Magashule and some of his people to ‘protect the peace’ in the Free State. The national leadership put further pressure on her during a meeting at Luthuli House. According to Marshoff, a senior party leader told her that, for the sake of stability in the province, she should appoint Magashule in a department where there were not many resources for him to plunder.
Magashule apparently wanted to be MEC for public works or economic affairs, but those departments were seen as too well-funded and important. Marshoff finally budged and agreed to appoint Magashule as the MEC for agriculture, a move she now regrets. ‘There is not a lot of money in that department, but it has access to or control over lots of resources, so it is still a very important portfolio,’ she said.
‘It was a big mistake to appoint him there.’
With this appointment, the new premier managed to enforce a ceasefire, but the peace was as fragile as ever. Right from the get-go, Magashule and his allies showed their contempt for Marshoff’s leadership. An example of this was the lack of respect they displayed for the provincial government’s processes and traditions
. Magashule and nine other new MECs were supposed to be sworn in at the provincial legislature on 30 April 2004, but on the day they were
nowhere to be found and the event had to be postponed.
When they were eventually sworn in on a later date, Marshoff warned them that ‘they would not have the luxury of settling into their posts’, but would instead have to get to work immediately. 2
As agriculture MEC, Magashule showed a willingness to directly involve himself in matters affecting the industry. As an example, when an emerging black farmer near Heilbron decided to sell his farm and equipment because of a lack of support and mentorship, the MEC
intervened by personally phoning the auctioneer to put a stop to the auction and telling the farmer that he was not allowed to sell the land because the transaction would have worked against government’s land-reform objectives. Magashule’s department then promised the farmer funding of more than R300 000 to convert the farm into a dairy and cattle venture. 3
Other emerging farmers were not as lucky. Shortly after Magashule’s appointment, his department froze a development programme that had been funded by the European Union. Magashule maintained that the programme showed signs of irregular expenditure, but the Democratic Alliance (DA) accused him of leading its beneficiaries to financial ruin. 4 The DA in the province later stated that Magashule had ‘totally failed’ in his role as MEC for agriculture. 5
Less than a year into his tenure, in April 2005, Marshoff dropped Magashule when she reshuffled her executive council. Another victim of the reshuffle was economic affairs MEC Benny Malakoane. Both men were shifted to the provincial legislature. 6
Marshoff was rather cryptic about her reasons for axing the duo, saying at the time that the reshuffle was meant to improve service delivery in the province. She told the Mail & Guardian that the axed
MECs had admitted that their performances were not up to scratch, but Magashule and Malakoane both denied this. 7
The reshuffle caused a stir, especially given the fact that Magashule was ANC chair. His axing risked amplifying political tensions in the province. The story soon died down, however, and the public never learnt exactly why Magashule was fired.
In an interview with Marshoff in 2018, she revealed to me the real reasons behind her decision. One Friday after work, she was at home in Bloemfontein when her phone rang. It was one of her staffers, calling to inform her about a pending political fiasco involving Magashule, his ANC region in the north and the Glen College of Agriculture, a state-funded agricultural college situated about twenty-five kilometres outside Bloemfontein. The college fell under the leadership of Magashule’s Department of Agriculture.
‘This person told me that Ace had instructed staff members at the college to slaughter the college’s calves and to put the meat into separate parcels,’ recalled Marshoff. At the time, the ANC’s Fezile Dabi region was about to hold a regional conference in Sasolburg. ‘The meat parcels were meant to be distributed among ANC members who were going to attend the conference so that they would vote for Magashule’s slate,’ she explained.
The heist was still under way by the time the premier got word of it, so she phoned the police to try to stop it. ‘The police managed to intercept three Department of Agriculture bakkies that were full of meat parcels and that were on their way to Sasolburg.’
Marshoff later learnt that there were more vehicles carrying meat than just the three apprehended, and that some of the conference attendees did get their meat parcels courtesy of Magashule. ‘The department staff
who were driving the bakkies confirmed that Ace had ordered them to take the meat up north,’ Marshoff said. ‘That is when I decided to fire Ace. This is what Ace does, he buys people’s support and he uses government resources to do that.’
Dumbfounded by these revelations, I endeavoured to find out more about Magashule’s alleged theft of state-owned cattle. A long-serving staff member at Glen College confirmed the incident. ‘If I remember correctly, there were about thirty-two cattle that were slaughtered, and the meat was taken to a political event somewhere up north,’ he told me.
Magashule’s habit of abusing the college’s resources apparently continued after he became premier. ‘It became quite normal for them to fetch or slaughter cattle here when there were political funerals or other political events,’ this source told me in August 2018. ‘It is a scandal because it is the state’s property, not theirs to just take. It has since become less common [after Magashule’s departure from the province].
They have only come to fetch two [cattle] so far this year.’
Marshoff, meanwhile, took the cattle incident and some of Magashule’s other shortcomings as MEC for agriculture to the national leadership and asked them if she could fire him. ‘Apart from the cattle thing, his department was generally in a mess,’ she explained. ‘There was no coordination, he sometimes failed to attend ExCo meetings and he didn’t submit the necessary reports for his department.’
She told Mbeki that she could not work with Magashule, and the president agreed that she needed to remove him. ‘It caused a lot of problems for me in the ANC, seeing as I had dared to remove the all-powerful Ace,’ recalled Marshoff.
After being booted out of the Department of Agriculture, Magashule
became the ANC’s chief whip in the provincial legislature. He now no longer had direct access to government coffers or contracts, but it seems he still managed to involve himself in dodgy deals.
A Mail & Guardian report implicated Magashule and other politicians in an alleged scheme in 2007 to extract kickbacks from a property developer in exchange for their help in resolving a dispute over the sale of a piece of land owned by the Mangaung metropolitan municipality.
Magashule denied the allegations, but did concede that he had met with the developer. 8
‘I attended the meeting [with the property developer] in my capacity as the provincial chairperson of the ANC and I was approached by both parties to facilitate an amicable solution,’ he told the newspaper when it broke the story in 2009. ‘It is not uncommon for me to intervene in matters of governance, since the ANC is the ruling party in government and has to obviously provide leadership and strategic guidance on all matters of policy, especially those aimed at empowering our people.’
In 2007, the national leadership asked Marshoff once again to make room for Magashule in her executive council. ‘They wanted me to place him in another department that did not have access to a lot of money,’ she said. Publicly, the national leadership’s motivation was to try to secure peace and harmony in the battle-ridden province. Behind the scenes, the Mbeki camp was on political manoeuvres.
In August, Magashule was appointed the Free State’s new MEC for sport, arts, culture and recreation. 9 His presence in this new government environment caused friction and problems. Rachel Sempe, the department’s then head, apparently had her hands full trying to stop Magashule from doing things that ran against the Public Finance
Management Act and other rules and regulations. Magashule allegedly tried to force the department to employ people whom he had promised jobs.
‘People went to the department and said Ace told them to go and work there, but there were no jobs advertised and the jobs weren’t budgeted for,’ said Marshoff. ‘When Ace promised to give someone a job, he would make sure that person got the job.’ She reiterated a claim made by almost every source I spoke to: Magashule deftly used the promise of employment in provincial and municipal structures to his advantage. As he did with the meat parcels from Glen College, he handed out jobs to buy patronage.
After less than a year in the Department of Sport, Arts, Culture and Recreation, Magashule was once again fired by Marshoff. But his political power kept growing. By that stage, the influence he wielded as ANC Free State chair and chairperson of the party’s deployment committee had turned him into the province’s most formidable political force.
‘He determined who became mayor, municipal manager or CFO at all t
he municipalities,’ explained Marshoff. ‘He abused this scenario and influenced people at those municipalities to give tenders to people close to him or to people he needed to support him.’
Municipal officials who failed to comply were apparently swiftly dealt with. ‘Ace had the ability to instil a deathly fear in people,’ said Marshoff. ‘Those who did not obey his orders were threatened with redeployment, suspension or demotion. He was in control of people’s careers, their futures, so they did as he asked them to do.’
A former municipal official in the Fezile Dabi district confirmed that Magashule had his hands on the municipality’s finances long before he
became premier. ‘The municipal manager decides where a municipal tender should go,’ this source explained. ‘They appoint a tender committee, which usually consists of the municipal manager, the CFO
and some junior staffers from procurement. The municipal manager and the CFO would report to Ace, so it was easy to control the committee.’
He gave an example of how Magashule meddled in the municipality’s finances. In around 2002 or 2003, after Magashule became ANC
provincial chair, the Fezile Dabi district municipality was asked to provide money for a music festival at the Abrahamsrust holiday resort near Sasolburg. The event was supposedly initiated to create awareness around HIV/AIDS.
‘Our municipality decided not to contribute funding, because we thought there were better ways to combat HIV/AIDS,’ the source told me. But they did not have much choice. ‘We got instructions from Ace’s people to make the money available, and that was the end of the matter,’ explained the former official.
Sixteen years later, the district municipality is still pouring money into what has become an annual concert, despite a directive from Treasury that municipalities should stop sponsoring such events. 10
6
Crushing the Scorpions
Gangster State Page 7
