Efforts by the ANC to unseat President Jacob Zuma tilted towards the end game on Wednesday as the speaker of parliament Baleka Mbete said party leader Cyril Ramaphosa would outline Zuma’s fate imminently.
“In this day there will be some progress which the president of the ANC will be ready to come back to us about,” she told the eNCA television channel this morning.
President Jacob Zuma last night agreed to step down following a deal struck with ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa at a meeting in Cape Town.
Details of the deal are yet to be worked out, but senior ANC sources said Ramaphosa decided to postpone the much-anticipated national executive committee (NEC) meeting scheduled for tonight after Zuma agreed to go.
But the deal seems to have taken some of the party’s top leaders by surprise as they were gearing themselves up for tonight’s meeting where the party was to recall Zuma from office.
Two senior ANC leaders who spoke to Sowetan last night complained that Ramaphosa had not consulted with some of his top six officials before making the surprise announcement that the NEC meeting would now be postponed to next weekend.
Party secretary-general Ace Magashule is said to have been with Zuma and Ramaphosa before the start of the meeting at Zuma’s Cape Town residence but that the two held the discussion without him being present in the room.
While the mood within the ANC has been that of taking the fight to Zuma following his refusal on Sunday to step down, Ramaphosa is understood to have always sought an arrangement that would see Zuma stepping down without being officially fired.
In a short statement issued last night, the ANC said the postponement followed “fruitful and constructive engagements, on various issues” between Zuma and Ramaphosa.
Ramaphosa’s supporters within the party said Zuma’s departure from office was now “a done deal” and that the two of them were working out the terms of the exit. It was not clear when Zuma is expected to announce his resignation.
But an NEC member who campaigned for Ramaphosa to be ANC president said Zuma was not likely to still be in office by the weekend.
Zuma’s about-turn puts an end to a conflict that looked destined to result in him being recalled by the party or axed from office through an opposition parties’ sponsored motion of no confidence.
On Sunday, he refused to abdicate office, arguing that Ramaphosa and other officials did not have a mandate from the NEC to ask him to resign. He dared them to take the matter to a full NEC meeting. But, with just a day to go before the NEC meeting, and with parliament taking an extraordinary step to postpone his State of the Nation Address, Zuma seems to have finally realised yesterday that his time was up.
Zuma was scheduled to deliver Sona tomorrow evening, but those plans were shelved by National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete and other presiding officers amid uncertainty over his future.
Speaking to reporters following her meeting with opposition parties, Mbete said they had approached Zuma on Monday with a view to postpone the event, only to learn that he was thinking the same too. Mbete said they were convinced that there would be no peace in the house if Zuma was allowed to go ahead with the speech as opposition parties had long indicated that they were opposed to the ceremony going ahead.
“We decided to approach the president of the Republic to propose that we postpone the joint sitting in order to create room for establishing a much more conducive political atmosphere in parliament.
“When we met the president, we then learnt that he was already writing to parliament to ask for the postponement of Sona,” said Mbete.
“… These actions are being taken in the best interests of parliament and the country.” – additional reporting by Reuters.
