South Africa’s political calendar in 2007 was dominated by the build-up to the ANC’s watershed elective conference in Polokwane in December.
As the year came to an end, commentators and analysts tried to take a reading of the political winds swirling around the main power blocs led by Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. On the surface, neither leader seemed to be getting much love from Magashule’s Free State ANC.
One news report described how Magashule had ‘mastered the art of fence-sitting’ by not openly throwing his weight behind either Zuma or Mbeki. 1 Considering the snubs that he had endured under previous presidents, his cautious approach is perhaps understandable.
Mbeki had an obvious disadvantage. As president, he had already denied Magashule the Free State premiership. But Zuma had also played a role in blocking Magashule’s appointment. When he served as deputy president under Mbeki, Zuma was one of the national leaders in favour of ‘banishing’ Magashule to Cape Town in the late 1990s to try to quash the faction-fighting in the Free State. ‘Zuma himself said that Ace needed to go to Parliament to help the Free State ANC survive,’
said Marshoff.
A former ally confirmed that Magashule was not a fan of either Zuma or Mbeki. ‘Mbeki had already disappointed him, but he was not sure if he could trust Zuma,’ said this source.
While Magashule made up his mind about whom he would support, the ANC in the Free State remained fractured, and threatened to
weaken the province’s contribution to the Polokwane conference.
The trouble started in early 2007, when a group of disgruntled party members obtained an interim interdict against all decisions taken at the party’s Fezile Dabi regional conference. 2 Allegations of vote-rigging and other irregularities at branch and regional level added to the chaos, and there was even talk at one point that the Free State ANC would split.3 One court ruling determined that some of the province’s branches were unfit to send delegates to the national conference. 4
Magashule’s faction was accused of manipulating the outcome of branch meetings through a variety of dubious means that contravened the ANC’s constitution. These included allegedly convening branch meetings in a ‘secretive and selective’ manner by failing to properly notify all branch members of such meetings, and ‘unlawfully’
excluding certain ANC members from branch meetings by ensuring that their names did not appear on branch registers. 5 The court found that the applicants had not provided enough evidence to substantiate their allegations. However, later court rulings against the Magashule bloc would confirm that the province’s ANC politics was rife with rogue behaviour.
Papi Kganare recalled that in the build-up to Polokwane, his faction wanted the national leadership to intervene in the Free State by helping to ensure that the nomination processes in the various regions were concluded without any funny business. ‘Our suggestion was that MPs needed to oversee the process in some districts, or, for instance, that Gauteng’s leadership come to oversee the process in the Fezile Dabi district,’ he told me.
The request was refused. According to Kganare, the NEC, which could have ensured that voting in the branches and regions occurred in
a more transparent and above-board manner, did not wish to interfere.
The reason for this, Kganare alleged, was that they were Mbeki supporters who were somehow under the impression that Magashule would back their slate at Polokwane.
‘Before Polokwane, [ANC communications head] Smuts Ngonyama came to the Free State to represent the NEC, and he was sure that Magashule would support Mbeki,’ Kganare said. ‘But we warned him that Ace wouldn’t support Mbeki because Mbeki did not make him premier.’
Kganare also said that Essop Pahad, Mbeki’s right-hand man, was similarly convinced that Magashule would channel the Free State’s support to Mbeki. ‘We told him that Ace was not going to support Mbeki, but he was adamant that Ace had promised to endorse Mbeki,’
added Kganare.
According to sources close to political developments preceding the Polokwane conference, Magashule’s appointment as MEC of sport, arts, culture and recreation in August 2007 was the result of a back-channel agreement orchestrated by the Mbeki camp. ‘Mbeki was desperate for the Free State’s votes,’ said one source. ‘He and Essop Pahad came to Bloemfontein to plead for the province’s support. That is when Ace was again made MEC.’
This person, a former staffer in Marshoff’s office, said the then premier agreed to appoint Magashule ‘at Thabo’s request’ and that there was a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that the Free State ANC would support Mbeki in exchange for Magashule’s appointment as MEC.
Marshoff, apparently seeking a second term as premier in 2009, did not want to burn the bridge between her and Mbeki, and therefore agreed to play along.
But Mbeki and his people were gravely mistaken if they thought that they had won the support of Magashule and his followers. At the Free State’s provincial nominations conference in late November, Zuma got more than three times the number of votes that Mbeki could muster, despite earlier indications that the winner would be decided by a narrow margin. 6 Zuma had somehow managed to win Magashule’s backing.
Kganare said that Magashule could not face Smuts Ngonyama, one of Mbeki’s closest allies, after the nominations conference. ‘As soon as it was announced that the Free State would endorse Zuma and not Mbeki, Ace disappeared without talking to Smuts,’ he told me.
Kganare said that things would have turned out differently if the national leadership had listened to the southern camp’s grievances about vote-rigging and other irregularities, seeing as that faction had resolved to back Mbeki. He was not in the least surprised that Magashule threw his weight behind Zuma. ‘Ace knew that if Mbeki won, he would never become premier,’ Kganare said.
After Zuma thrashed Mbeki at Polokwane, with the Free State’s help, Magashule must have reckoned that he had earned his pound of flesh.
But there were further opportunities for him to conclusively win over the newly elected ANC president.
After Polokwane, Zuma still faced a mammoth threat in the form of the corruption charges against him emanating from the 1999 Arms Deal. It was a battle that would require considerable monetary resources, a problem for the perpetually broke Zuma.
In July 2008, a month before Zuma was set to appear in the Pietermaritzburg High Court, he attended the Free State’s provincial conference in Parys.
After being re-elected as the party’s provincial chair, Magashule took to the stage and ‘forced’ his fellow party members and invited guests, including several businesspeople from the Free State, to make donations to Zuma. ‘It is our duty to support the ANC president, both morally and financially,’ Magashule told the Sunday Times when asked if he was trying to buy Zuma’s favour.
The small army of mayors, municipal managers, MECs and businesspeople in attendance did Magashule proud, donating R52 000
in cash, which was placed in a black leather bag and presented to Zuma on stage, and pledging an additional R1.4 million. The awkward, crude gesture apparently had some senior party members squirming with embarrassment.
Although Zuma refused to say whether Magashule would be the next Free State premier after the incident, judging by subsequent events it did not harm Magashule’s chances. 7
At the end of 2008, Magashule became a key figure in the narrative about Zuma’s supposed persecution at the hands of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and the Scorpions, South Africa’s former elite corruption-fighting unit.
It was alleged that then Free State Scorpions boss Shadrack Sibiya had wanted to arrest Magashule before the provincial conference in July to prevent him from once again being elected chair. In an instant, Magashule was elevated to the level of fellow martyr in the ongoing battle between the Scorpions, who were accused of pushing a political agenda, and dodgy ANC leaders like Zuma.
‘We have been saying that the Scorpions have positioned themselves to persecute leaders of the ANC b
ut nobody listened to us,’ then ANC
secretary-general Gwede Mantashe told the Sowetan. ‘There is nothing new about this. We believe they are targeting many more ANC leaders than just Magashule. ’8
Magashule, who had accusations of corruption hanging over his head long before Zuma, was one of the foremost proponents of disbanding the Scorpions. At the Free State leg of Parliament’s series of public hearings on the Scorpions’ future, Magashule apparently ‘hijacked’
proceedings and accused the crime-fighting unit of being prejudiced against black people. 9
Not long thereafter, Magashule and Zuma got what they desired. In January 2009, the Scorpions were officially disbanded. 10 For a large part of the following decade, shady politicians, government officials and businesspeople had almost free rein to loot state resources.
It would appear that Magashule had good cause to join Zuma’s anti-Scorpions chorus. It can now be revealed that before the unit was disbanded, it was indeed close to arresting Magashule. And contrary to the narrative that the Scorpions were politically motivated, the unit had gathered several solid dockets on Magashule that centred on his transgressions in the Free State.
Sibiya, whom I met in August 2018, confirmed that the Scorpions were investigating Magashule and that they had made good progress in this regard before the unit was dismantled. ‘Ace knows about this, he was questioned by the Scorpions on several occasions,’ said Sibiya, who now leads the City of Johannesburg’s anti-corruption unit.
Other sources familiar with the Scorpions’ work provided further details. ‘The Scorpions focused on top-level corruption, fraud and other transgressions involving prominent people,’ said one former Scorpions insider. ‘You might refer to these people as high-flyers or even
untouchables. Ace was one of the people we were looking at.’
The Magashule probes were codenamed ‘Project Moetapele’, which translates to ‘Project Leader’ in English, the source told me. Some of the issues the Scorpions were probing included Magashule’s abuse of state resources at the Glen College of Agriculture. ‘Ace was handing out cows, sheep and other livestock to people without following the proper procedures,’ confirmed the former Scorpions insider, who also told me that the unit had obtained a search-and-seizure warrant and raided Glen College.
The Scorpions had also been investigating Magashule’s possible involvement in the sale of municipal land on the Vaal River near Parys.
Marshoff told me that while she was premier, then NPA boss Vusi Pikoli visited her in the Free State. ‘Vusi told me that Ace was going to be arrested, and that we needed to be prepared for the political ramifications that this would have in the Free State,’ she said.
Of course, the Scorpions were shut down before they could act. ‘All of the data and files we had on Ace were handed over to the SAPS [South African Police Service] when we were disbanded,’ said the former Scorpions insider.
The Project Moetapele files may well be stashed away in a dusty, unused office somewhere in a SAPS building in Bloemfontein. Or perhaps they were taken to the police’s national headquarters in Pretoria. That is, of course, if they were not destroyed.
Magashule received another break in late 2008 with the formation of the Congress of the People. The new opposition party absorbed several key individuals who were formerly members of or aligned to the Free State ANC’s southern (anti-Magashule) faction, including Mosiuoa Lekota and Kganare. Even former Magashule allies who had
previously locked horns with Lekota, such as Vax Mayekiso, flocked to the newly formed COPE.11
Although the ANC would have to deal with the added scrutiny of a new opposition party, the development subdued the infighting in the province long enough for Magashule to further strengthen his grip.
After one more stop, at the Department of Public Safety and Security in October 2008, 12 Magashule was finally appointed premier of the Free State in May 2009. It would not take long for the money to really start flowing to his family and friends.
But before considering this, we will take an in-depth look at the murder of Noby Ngombane, an event that highlighted the ferocity of the political wrangling between the Free State’s rival ANC factions.
7
The assassination of Noby Ngombane
When Noby Nyovo Ngombane returned to his native Free State in 1998 after a stint abroad, the province was as politically volatile and fractured as it had been since the 1980s. Ace Magashule had become the ANC’s chairperson in August of that year, but the province was being run by Premier Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, the ‘outsider’ backed by the national leadership of Nelson Mandela and loathed by Magashule and his band of northerners.
Ngombane and his wife, Nokwanda, had spent a few years in Sweden, where he had worked as a programme officer at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Upon his return to South Africa, he stepped into the Free State’s political fray by taking up positions that would inevitably mark him as an enemy in the eyes of the Magashule faction.
Ngombane first served as a special advisor to Matsepe-Casaburri before assuming the same role in the office of Winkie Direko, yet another so-called outsider whom the national leadership had picked to become premier ahead of Magashule. Then, in 2000, the national leadership plucked Ngombane from the proverbial frying pan and dropped him into the fire below by putting him in charge of the ANC’s Interim Leadership Committee (ILC). This was the structure put in place after the dissolution of Magashule’s PEC amid the unsustainable political volatility and infighting in the Free State.
Nokwanda told me her husband had been somewhat surprised when
the Mbeki-led national leadership called him up to help lead the party in the Free State. Ngombane was first and foremost a South African Communist Party (SACP) man, and as such was on the sidelines when it came to the ANC’s internal politics.
But his relative detachment from the factional battles probably made him the ideal candidate for the role. Nokwanda said the national leadership viewed her husband as politically neutral, but the Magashule faction was not convinced. ‘Noby tried to make the two warring groups reconcile, that is where the hatred [towards him]
started,’ maintained Nokwanda. She said it was not in the northern camp’s best interest to have peace in the province, at least not on any terms set by ‘outsiders’ who had been ‘imposed’ on the province by Mbeki and co.
The ILC was mandated with two main tasks: firstly, to ensure that the ANC’s branches in the province functioned optimally; thereafter, to organise and oversee a credible provincial elective conference free of allegations and accusations of vote-rigging and other irregularities. As coordinator of the interim structure, Ngombane quickly made some powerful enemies in the Free State, especially among people aligned to Magashule.
In 2001, while Magashule was still serving as an MP in Cape Town, Direko reshuffled the province’s executive council and in the process got rid of three MECs who hailed from the north. She replaced them with people from the province’s southern region, which obviously angered the Magashule camp. They directed their fury at Ngombane’s ILC, which in their view had influenced Direko’s decisions.1
They saw the reshuffle as a move designed to ‘purge’ the provincial cabinet ‘of supporters of ANC provincial chairperson Ace Magashule’,
according to a Mail & Guardian report. 2 One of the new appointees was Beatrice Marshoff, who became MEC for social development. 3
Although Direko effected the cabinet reshuffle, Marshoff’s inclusion in the executive council was ‘widely’ viewed as having been influenced by Ngombane’s ILC.4 The move was also a precursor to her later replacement of Direko as Free State premier. Ngombane has therefore been described as the man who ‘helped’ Marshoff ‘into the top spot’. 5
This view would later be a key ingredient in the political tension around Ngombane.
Ngombane ‘bailed out’ of the ILC in 2001, before the provincial conference to be held the following year, recal
led his widow. ‘He was getting too frustrated,’ she explained. ‘He had a mandate to build the branches in the province and strike a balance between the two factions, but he could not make any inroads in this regard.’
Ngombane returned to the provincial government, but his days of locking horns with political foes were far from over. He took a job as head of department (HOD) at Economic Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs, where he clashed with MEC Sakhiwo Belot.
According to Nokwanda, appointments were made in Belot’s department without following proper processes, and this led to friction.
Belot later became a special advisor to Magashule. 6
A KPMG report highlighted the tension between Ngombane and Belot, and recommended that one or both leave the department.7 Belot subsequently made way for Benny Malakoane, but the shuffle did not bring the department’s problems to an end. In fact, Nokwanda said the fighting between her husband and the new MEC was worse.
Ngombane had by then established himself as an official who respected the rules and laws that govern public bodies, including the
Public Service Act and the Public Finance Management Act. He drew Malakoane’s ire when he acted swiftly to suspend four of the department’s chief directors over financial irregularities. 8 The suspended officials were later reinstated by a court order. At the time, Malakoane had claimed that Ngombane was undermining his authority. 9 ‘He had this attitude of “we are here to work”,’ explained Nokwanda. ‘It was not necessarily about cracking down on corruption, but about making sure we give the people what the ANC said it would give people.’
Ngombane’s reputation as someone who fought maladministration would continue to swell after Beatrice Marshoff replaced Direko as premier in early 2004. In August of that year, he was appointed head of a newly formed policy coordination unit in the premier’s office. It was a powerful position, seeing as he would have Marshoff’s ear in matters involving governance and the financial affairs of the province’s departments and entities. The appointment was bound to revive the simmering discord between the opposing political camps. Those who had previously blamed Ngombane’s ILC for influencing Direko’s decision to appoint MECs from the southern faction weren’t happy.
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