By Thembalethu Nyikilana
Former SRC President, Nelson Mandela University
Cde Mantashe,
You once stood before this organisation and told it the truth it did not want to hear. In 2017, as Secretary General, you tabled a diagnostic report so damning that factions in Mpumalanga, the North West and the Free State tried to strangle it before it was even read into the record. You spoke of political bankruptcy.
You spoke of manipulation of branches. You spoke of resources squandered on factional meetings while the organisation bled financially, of gatekeeping, of vote-buying, of a movement whose structures had drifted so far from the people they claimed to serve that “social distance” had become the defining feature of the relationship between the ANC and the very communities it was founded to liberate.
You named the cancer, held the scalpel up for every camera in the room, and then quietly put it down and walked away from the operating table. You have not picked it back up since.
That report should have been the beginning of a reckoning. Instead it became the one relic you drag out whenever your legacy is questioned, a diagnosis frozen in amber, never once followed by treatment.
You wrote the file, you never opened the patient, and now, as National Chairperson, you are not the surgeon returning to finish what he started, you are the orderly blocking the door, arms folded, insisting nothing is wrong while the patient rots in front of him.
This is not caution. This is complicity dressed up as calm.
This is the posturing I write to you about, and posturing is too gentle a word for it. Principle would have meant carrying the diagnosis into the cure. What you have practised instead is theatre, performed insight with no follow-through, a man who reads the factional weather before he reads his own conscience.
Your “wisdom” is never a warning delivered in time to change an outcome, it is a eulogy delivered once the outcome is safely unchangeable and there is nothing left for anyone to actually do about it. You are never early, you are never brave when bravery might cost you a seat at the top table, you arrive after the wreckage and lecture the survivors on how it could have been avoided, as if you were not the one holding the ANC’s own weather report the entire time and choosing to say nothing.
And when members do exactly what your own report all but demanded, when they refuse to let manipulation and gatekeeping stand and take their fight to the courts because the party’s internal remedies have been captured by the very factions your diagnosis named, you do not meet them with the introspection you once performed for the cameras.
You meet them with the oldest, cheapest trick in the Luthuli House playbook: recast the aggrieved as the aggressor. Disgruntled. Bitter. Manipulated by lawyers, not driven by principle.
Members who “expel themselves” the moment they dare seek a court’s protection against a process you yourself once admitted had been captured by factional interests. It is not just hypocrisy, it is contempt, contempt for the very people whose desperation you diagnosed in black and white and then chose to weaponise against them the moment they acted on it.
There is a specific cruelty in this, Cde Mantashe, because you know better than almost anyone what it costs an ordinary member to walk into a courtroom against their own movement, and you inflict that cost anyway, without flinching, because it is politically convenient to call them traitors rather than admit the rot you yourself catalogued.
And there is a naked, undisguised hypocrisy sitting right alongside it, because when the shoe was on your own foot, when the Zondo Commission’s findings touched your name, you did not treat the courts as an act of betrayal against the organisation. You ran to them.
You sought a judicial review to overturn findings you didn’t like, while lecturing the Commission itself not to get dragged into the ANC’s internal battles. So the courts are illegitimate when a branch member uses them against a captured, manipulated process, but entirely righteous the moment you need them to protect your own name and legacy.
That is not principle, that is self-preservation wearing the ANC’s colours, and everyone watching can see the seams.
This is who you have chosen to be at Luthuli House: the chairperson who defends the status quo not because he believes in it, but because the status quo has been extraordinarily good to him for the better part of two decades.
You have outlasted premier leagues and reform factions alike, not by resolving the contradictions between them, but by never standing anywhere long enough for either to pin you down.
Your own comrades in the ANC and SACP have said it themselves, that you sat on the fence long enough to secure a soft landing, that your obduracy only ever surfaces when you personally are threatened, never when the organisation is bleeding structurally in exactly the ways you once documented.
A man who is only “principled” when it is politically survivable to be so is not principled at all. He is a survivor, and survivors do not get to be mistaken for statesmen.
The tragedy, if you can even call it that anymore, is that you were once capable of more. The diagnostic report took nerve, real nerve, to write and to defend against provinces that wanted it buried before it was tabled. But a diagnosis that is never followed by treatment is not medicine, it is malpractice, and eventually the patient stops believing the doctor was ever trying to heal anyone but himself.
That is exactly where the ANC’s membership now stands with you. They have watched you narrate the disease in exquisite, damning detail, and then spend every single year since defending the conditions that produced it.
They have watched you call their search for justice “organised chaos” while your own legal manoeuvres against inconvenient findings are dressed up as due process and principled restraint.
They are not confused about the difference between a leader and an obstacle standing in a leader’s shoes. You have simply chosen, term after term, which one to be, and you have chosen wrong every time it mattered.
History does not remember diagnosticians who refused to treat as wise men. It remembers them as men who saw the truth clearly and buried it anyway to protect themselves, men whose insight becomes, in hindsight, not evidence of wisdom but the sharpest possible indictment of their cowardice. You had the file.
You had the room. You had, for one fleeting moment in 2017, more moral authority inside this movement than almost anyone standing in it. You spent every ounce of it protecting your own position, one term at a time, until “wisdom” became a word people use about you with contempt rather than respect.
The diagnosis was correct, Cde Mantashe. The tragedy, the real and lasting one, is that you were the physician who wrote it, and you have spent every year since making absolutely certain it stayed true. We stand with Cde Andile Lungisa who said his appeal is not for personal favour, nor is it the lamentation of a comrade who believes that political office is private property.
He is only resisting injustice.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Inside Politics.
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