Is this the team to save the ANC from Western Cape obliteration?

The African National Congress (ANC) has announced the names of the interim provincial leadership task team which has to attempt to rebuild the organisation in the Western Cape after its worst provincial electoral performance ever.

In the May 2019 election, the ANC chalked up only 27% of the vote in the only province it does not govern. The party’s electoral effort was placed in the hands of former Western Cape Premier, Ebrahim Rasool, who had to admit afterwards that it was a disaster in just about every respect, from voter transport efforts to food provisioning on election day.

The ANC loses further ground in Western Cape

As could be expected from Rasool, the 2019 electoral effort seemed focused on winning back Coloured support, with much emphasis on the Muslim community. This effort failed, however. In a complicated rearrangement of the urban Coloured vote, the ACDP and Patricia de Lille’s Good benefited while the DA’s support levels did not change much. It was the ANC which lost ground.

The ANC’s white Western Cape support remained negligible and it lost some black support to the EFF. It now only holds 12 seats in the Western Cape legislature of 43, down from 14 seats before the election.   

The National Executive Committee of the ANC disbanded the Western Cape provincial executive of the party when it failed to organise the regional and provincial elective conferences to replace itself once its term had lapsed. It was therefore in office illegally.

Former MP Lerumo Kalako heads up the team, assisted by Ronalda Nalumango. But they need to stitch together a solution with a team which seems to replicate the exact divisions it is supposed to heal.

Lynne Brown touted as ANC’s first choice in the Western Cape

Rasool is in the team together with several of his supporters, but he will be looking across the room and encountering people like James Ngculu, who challenged and vanquished him, and Lynne Brown, who played such a huge role in unseating him during what became known as the brown envelope scandal, when the erstwhile Rasool provincial leadership allegedly paid journalists for favourable coverage.

Other notables in Kalako’s team include the hard-working current ANC leader in the legislature, Cameron Dugmore (who was Rasool’s MEC for education), former provincial treasurer Maurencia Gillion (who was memorably suspended earlier this year and reinstated within a few days), former provincial secretary Faiez Jacobs, parliamentarians Richard Dyantyi and Zou Kota, and another former provincial secretary, Songezo Mjongile.

The team has firstly been tasked with reviving the ANC’s Western Cape branch structures, which are in disarray and have to be reconstituted. Each branch must then, by order of the ANC NEC, accept an action plan to get it working again, trying to stem the tide against the ANC in a province the national leadership has tasked the group with one day winning back and governing for the green, black and gold.