South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was reappointed this Monday (19) to the leadership of his party, the African National Congress (ANC), crowning a comeback after the 70-year-old politician was involved in a scandal involving cash found on one of his properties.
The party re-elected Ramaphosa as leader with about 57% of the delegates’ votes, against 43% obtained by his only opponent, the former Minister of Health Zweli Mkhize, 66.
The CNA congress also elected a party leadership more aligned with Ramaphosa than the one chosen at the last party meeting, in 2017.
Even so, Mkhize’s expressive vote and the boos recorded against Ramaphosa at the opening of the ANC congress last Friday (16) in Johannesburg indicate that the president still faces some internal dissent.
Sipho Mthembu, leader of the ANC in Gauteng province, told the AFP news agency that he was “very disappointed” with the result. “We all know that a lot of bad things happened under Ramaphosa and the image of the ANC was compromised,” he said.
Siphiwe Mazibuko, delegate from the province of KwaZulu-Natal, made appeals for party unity after the vote. “Zweli Mkhize was my preference, but we accept the result. Now that it’s over, the party needs to unite,” Mazibuko told Reuters news agency.
The president’s leadership was called into question in June, when a former intelligence officer filed a lawsuit against Ramaphosa, accusing him of omitting a burglary at one of his rural properties where he allegedly hid $508,000 in cash inside a sofa.
Ramaphosa has always denied wrongdoing, alleging that the money came from the legitimate sale of animals from his farm. The president was never indicted for the episode and, therefore, owes nothing to Justice.
The ANC rallied behind the president and saved him from impeachment proceedings last week in Parliament. Even so, five congressmen from the party voted in favor of impeachment, signaling the party’s internal dissent.
Now, Ramaphosa will have the challenge of reaffirming his leadership over the ANC if he wants to be re-elected for a second term at the head of the country in the 2024 general elections.
Although it remains popular, the CNA, Nelson Mandela’s party, which has been in power since the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, has had its image tarnished by successive corruption scandals in recent years.
Ramaphosa’s predecessor, Jacob Zuma, is serving a 15-month prison sentence for ignoring an order to testify in an inquiry looking into widespread corruption during his nine years in power.
Zuma’s arrest triggered a wave of protests and looting in the country that left more than 300 dead in July 2021. The former president even left prison to serve his sentence on parole for medical reasons, but a court ordered it in November the politician to go back to jail.
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