Thuma Mina group warns RET faction with Netshitenzhe projectile

The gloves are off between the Thuma Mina and the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) factions within the ANC.

It’s becoming an open war that a political analyst described as the ANC distancing itself from former president Jacob Zuma and his followers openly – and drawing a line in the sand.

The gulf widened between the two camps this weeks as ANC national executive committee member Joel Netshitenzhe, a former close confidant of former president Thabo Mbeki, took ideological aim at ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule – a leading RET faction figure – in an opinion piece in the Daily Maverick.

Netshitenzhe likened those in that faction, who support Zuma, to counter-revolutionaries in the same mould as Afonso Dhlakama and Jonas Savimbi. Those two men led rebel movements in Mozambique and Angola respectively which were backed by the government in the apartheid era.

Netshitenzhe took a swipe at Magashule after he referred to the Democratic Alliance as the “enemy of the national democratic revolution”.

He said Magashule’s characterisation of the opposition was contrary to debates within the movement since 1994 and the ANC 2007 Strategy and Tactics document.

The document stated: “Those who continue to resist change within the constitutional framework are opponents in a democratic order. Their political and other organisations are legitimate expressions of a school of thought that should be challenged, but at the same time accepted as part of democratic engagement.”

Netshitenzhe wrote: “But it cannot be ruled out that South Africa’s own Savimbis and Dhlakamas, who destabilised Angola and Mozambique with the support of the erstwhile SA Defence Force and its Military Intelligence, are crawling out of the woodwork and showing their true colours.”

Political analyst Daniel Silke saw Netshitenzhe’s statement as the Thuma Mina side’s “line in the sand” and “probably the most direct distancing of the ANC from the Zuma/Magashule faction I have seen”.

He said the article was an indictment on the role the RET was playing and “a charge sheet to prepare the way for a direct hit against the RET faction”.

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