It is as if, more than two months after the closing speeches were done, the ANC’s Nasrec conference hasn’t quite ended yet. On the upside, the new leadership did manage to make a decision about the old president – but then again, pretty much everyone except a small group in KwaZulu-Natal had wanted to see his back. But ever since, it’s been a bit of a patchwork.

Thursday’s press conference was about the new army of permanent deployments to Luthuli House as well as the party’s land policy, which is not actually available on paper yet because the Nasrec resolutions – if there were any – still have to be published.

ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe was in charge. Khusela Diko, who had stayed on a couple of months to be by his side, has finally bidden farewell to go home to rest. Mabe was flanked by ANC Secretary-General Ace Magashule, his seasoned deputy Jessie Duarte, and the two people deployed to help in their office, Senzo Mchunu and Dakota Legoete; freshly-sacked-and-still-feeling-it former police minister and full-time ANC elections organiser Fikile Mbalula; Febe Potgieter-Gqubule, freshly resigned deputy chairperson of the SABC board and back from an almost five-year stint at the African Union Commission, who will be assisting him and helping to professionalise and modernise the ANC, and former ANC spokesperson and now full-time ANC Presidency official in charge of monitoring and evaluation, Zizi Kodwa.

Pinky Moloi, who will be reinforcing the organising team, was absent.

The size of the team is as much an indication of how serious the ANC is about regaining lost ground in next year’s election as it is about how disjointed the unity effort could end up being.

First up among the questions were whether Magashule’s reinforcements (who happen to be from the camp that supported President Cyril Ramaphosa and who have to move homes from North West and KwaZulu-Natal to Johannesburg for the job) were there for political reasons. Obviously not, was the reply. It’s true that there were discussions at the policy conference in July that the office – and Luthuli House – had to be reinforced by permanent deployees.

Mchunu explained that the deployees would work as a team and that “we see no stampede about what we have to do at head office”. He came up with a metaphor about horse-riding where one is the rider, the other the jockey, and another feeding the horse.

“It will be highly co-ordinated,” he said at the press conference, which had to start late because those who called it did not foresee that President Cyril Ramaphosa would be addressing the House of Traditional Leaders at the same time that the press conference was scheduled to start. So, because the party could only speak with one voice at a time (or was this an issue of not wanting to force the channels to chose which one to live-feed?), it started 30 minutes late, instead of on Buffalo (or Gwede) Time.

Duarte said questions about the secretary-general’s office “feed into a narrative that we come here as contestants”. (Strangely, an ANC activist said the other day that it felt like everyone was still contesting, so it’s a bit more than a narrative.)

“We are not (contestants), we are a team,” she added.

Duarte informed especially the younger journalists that the late Safety and Security minister Steve Tshwete was, in those days, the ANC’s national organiser, working closely with the secretary-general, full-time.

On the question of where the party, still paying off debts from the time of Julius Malema’s youth league, will be getting the money for salaries, Duarte said:

“We don’t come to the ANC because of the salaries the ANC will pay us. I don’t want to comment on that. Irrespective of the salary, we are here to stay.”

That takes care of that, then.

Magashule also said the party would talk to former presidents Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe about getting involved in cadre development (political education is another term for this). Has the party felt them out about this yet? Magashule responded that leaders still had to talk to them.

There was also the obvious explainer about the recent land debate in the National Assembly, although the policy resolutions from Nasrec on this will only be available in a few weeks. Mbalula said a few words on the policy, although it was not clear what he was trying to say.

Responding to a question from the Mzwanele Manyi-owned media on whether the ANC still had the moral high ground on the land issue, he said something along the lines that it wasn’t about who claimed the victory on this (the EFF, obviously, are the winners, as they brought the motion) but the ANC came away from Nasrec with “a decisive decision on this matter” and had voted against the EFF’s land policy last year because they didn’t have this resolution to go on.

“Like all like-minded political parties who know this historic injustice, know this is a victory for the people of South Africa, and we will implement this in the context of the constitutional review (that was now under way in Parliament) and then it will be concluded,” he said.

The party’s talk about scrapping the willing buyer, willing seller principle would now be accelerated.

Duarte added that nobody would lose their house over the land policy, South Africa would not be another Zimbabwe, and that there should not be “unintended panic” because the land issue was a collective decision of all the parties and everything would be all right.

There was also a question that reflected the ANC Youth League’s unhappiness about its lack of representation in the recently shuffled Cabinet – and in the ANC in general. Magashule unconvincingly made an attempt by saying that youth league president Collen Maine headed the ANC’s deployment team to the Northern Cape (which is also the party’s smallest province), while Mbalula, Buti Manamela, Malusi Gigaba, Legoete, Kodwa, and many others (he didn’t mention Potgieter-Gqubule) are claimed by the league – as former youth.

That none of these people tasked with winning over the electorate – the most difficult to convince and the most important would be the young ones – are actually below 35 didn’t register as irony on Magashule’s face at all. DM

Photo: ANC delegates at the opening day of the ANC’s 54^th conference in Nasrec, Johannesburg, 16 December 2017. (Daily Maverick photo)