Just before you get to the community hall in Mthambothini village – about 120 km northeast of Pretoria – with Ndebele patterns on the wall, and the traditional council of Inkosi Nzunza ka Mabhoko that flanks it, there is a modest brick house, converted into a tiny tavern, with chairs outside. It’s an inviting place, and even though it’s still roughly church time, a few customers were already parked there with beers. In the tarred street, where not many cars pass, some guys in ANC golf shifts seemed to gravitate towards the home. They waited for the deputy president David “DD” Mabuza.

The village is in the old homeland of KwaNdebele, in the northwestern corner of Mpumalanga where the place names dissolve into small print, and these approximate the settlement with that name (there are no dots neatly indicating town centres). This also belies the number of people who live in between the areas of green that dot the map here.

Before long, Mabuza and his men pulled up in a relatively modest cavalcade of about four black cars, and disappeared up the road into the traditional leaders’ place, followed by two white bakkies with a trailer each, bearing four pieces of cattle in total as gifts.

The tavern made good business, as another two hours of waiting passed for those that were outside. The time allocated on Mabuza’s tightly-planned schedule did not take into account the number of things the leaders wanted to get off their chests in the closed-door meeting with him.

Around lunchtime Mabuza emerged from the council, walking the 100 metres or so down to the hall for the meeting. He was swamped by community members in a frenzy of selfie-taking. He was also dispensing T-shirts and kangas. At the best of times, such handouts can cause severe scuffles, even fisticuffs, and the Presidency’s security detail must have choice words for the ANC about this part of his electioneering job description.

Mabuza passed by 16-year-old Lucky Skhosana who was flogging his sister’s wares outside the community hall. He bought a hat with hand-painted Ndebele patterns on it.

“I’m too happy,” Skhosana beamed, “that the deputy president was here.”

In the hall, by now packed, Mabuza asked where the local branch was, and a cry went up from the crowd.

“There is no local branch,” the old man next to me whispered.

He claimed the chairperson of the Nkangala region, Speedy Mashilo, dissolved the branch because of disagreements, and it’s never been able to recover since. Mabuza promised them their concerns would be attended to.

After the meeting of about 15 minutes, the man whose nickname was “Unity” before the ANC’s elective conference in Nasrec in 2017 confessed he now feared that the party was splitting. Mabuza’s province famously did not declare allegiance with any of the two candidates and ended up voting for President Cyril Ramaphosa in what some in the opposing camp of Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma considered last-minute backstabbing. The Top Six officials and 80-strong national executive committee that were elected there turned out to be almost exactly evenly split between the camps – and mostly remain so.

Mabuza himself vacated his positions of provincial chair and premier in the province after his election as deputy president, leaving a leadership vacuum which hasn’t been filled. His micro-management didn’t leave much space for succession planning.

In an interview with Daily Maverick, Mabuza admitted that there were divisions in the party in Mpumalanga.

“We must run away from avoiding what is before us,” he said.

“We must move away from a denial state into accepting the problem that these divisions are now at a point where they threaten the life of the ANC. So we must be on it and focus on it. If we must make any contribution, any sacrifice for the unity of the ANC, this is the time, we must do that.”

What kind of sacrifice would that be?

“People must not think of themselves, about who is going to be a minister, who is going to be MEC, but think of the ANC first,” he said.

“Possibly you can compromise.”

Earlier, Mandla Msibi, who was a contender for the top spot in the province but now introduces himself as elections manager, explained that some people expected a reward for having backed Ramaphosa as the winning horse. When they didn’t get the positions they thought they were entitled to, they started fighting.

Asked how he thought the people of Mpumalanga felt about his departure in 2018, Mabuza said he got the impression that they felt neglected in the time he had been away.

“The premier is trying, the new premier [Refilwe Mtshweni], but I think I must come more often to help them to gel, to work with the current leadership. Obviously, there would be a contestation for the position that I held for three terms as a chairperson, and almost nine years as a chair,” he said.

Ultimately, though, Mabuza did not believe the infighting would affect whether people come out to vote or not on 8 May.

“They will vote.”

He said he talked to people about their grievances and “you can see they are happy now”. The same crowd that was tense and snappy before the meeting did appear a lot more relaxed when they dispersed afterwards. He said people committed themselves to fixing problems in the party. They had to, “otherwise we will have failed in our mission as a generation”, he said.

Mabuza spoke of the election results he was expecting with a touch more certainty. Mpumalanga is one of the ANC’s strongest provinces but the party’s majority here dropped to just over 78% in the 2014 elections. The votes went to the newly-formed Economic Freedom Fighters, the Bushbuckridge Residents’ Association, and some to the Democratic Alliance.

“We will go back to 81, 82 percent,” he said.

This was a tad lower than the 90% aim he set in front of a sizable crowd in the Mbombela Municipality on Saturday.

“The DA might reverse, the EFF might go down, the Bushbuckridge Residents’ Association might not come back, so as the ANC we have got enough opportunity to grab this space,” he said.

One of the EFF’s top leaders was kicked out in 2018 after a leadership tussle, and their presence in the province is by poster only – none of the pamphleteering ambush tactics staged on street corners in North West towns where Ramaphosa campaigned recently was evident here.

The comrades from Bushbuckridge have also since been lured back by Mabuza. Now the only unknown variable is the SA National Congress of Traditional Authorities, formed by Mabuza’s estranged friend, Themba Sigudla, who before Nasrec founded an NGO called the Practical Radical Economic Transformation of SA (the “radical economic transformation” gives a clue as to which candidate Sigudla wanted to see triumph at Nasrec – and it wasn’t Ramaphosa).

The party in the province was supposed to have elected new leaders by now, but more than a year after Mabuza’s departure, the fear of exacerbating disunity has led to a stalemate – and this, for the man whose office is now far away in the Union Buildings in Pretoria, is uncharted territory. DM