After a free-for-all period during which the leaders of several ANC provinces publicly expressed their preferences for the party’s leadership, the ANC’s Electoral Committee is now finally trying to bring some order to the race. It is likely that at least some of their instructions will be ignored, and that some provinces or groups will defy the committee.

While this once again displays the lack of discipline within ANC ranks, it may also be that the committee is simply acting too late, with their actions creating an unfair playing field. At the same time, it is not clear that trying to clamp down on what may be increased transparency in the race is really a good thing for South Africa and our democracy.

It emerged late last week that the chair of the ANC’s electoral committee, former President Kgalema Motlanthe, had written to the party’s treasurer, Paul Mashatile, in his capacity as acting deputy secretary-general.

In his letter, Motlanthe says: “The Electoral Committee is extremely disappointed and concerned about the recent pronouncements by certain provincial and regional structures regarding their preferred candidates for certain NEC positions… The Electoral Committee wishes to request you to issue a directive persuading all ANC structures and leaders from making these premature and undemocratic pronouncements of their preferred candidates.”

In short, Motlanthe wants people to stop saying in public who they are supporting for which positions in the ANC.

The timing of the letter is important to all of this.

It became public just after the ANC’s eThekwini region said it was going to back Dr Zweli Mkhize for the position of ANC leader. On the same day, the provincial executive committees of Gauteng and Limpopo also issued a public statement saying they were backing President Cyril Ramaphosa for a second term, Mashatile as his deputy and Nomvula Mokonyane as deputy secretary-general.

But it also comes after a lengthy period, going all the way back to January, during which provincial leaders have said who they would support.

It was during the party’s 110-year anniversary celebrations in January when the ANC’s Limpopo leader, Stanley Mathabatha, said they would back Ramaphosa. After almost every provincial leadership conference, the leadership of the particular province said who they would back.

Motlanthe’s main argument may be that leadership should not be making these kinds of comments during the nominations’ process, which opened just two weeks ago. But he does not refer to this in his letter. Rather he says that he is worried that branches are not free to nominate who they choose when their leadership has already expressed who they support.

Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations

This may be true, but the concern is surely limited. It is incredibly unlikely that the leaders of structures would make such pronouncements without already knowing what their branches are going to do.

Some branches would surely rebel against them, and it is also not clear that branches are really that intimidated. (At least one branch in Musina has said twice that it disagrees with the Limpopo leadership’s position on Ramaphosa.)

Of course, this is difficult to assess accurately.

Motlanthe’s letter puts some structures in a difficult position. The KwaZulu-Natal leadership has already said publicly it cannot comply with this.

They may well be entitled to feel that it is unfair for other provinces to spend the entire year saying who they will back, but now, through an accident of timing, they cannot do the same.

Those who are backing certain candidates may also feel strongly that this is about creating a deliberate disadvantage.

Certainly, this must create an unbalanced playing field. It is clear that no action is being countenanced against, for example, the provincial leaderships of Gauteng and Limpopo. Why, then, should KZN fear punishment for doing the same thing?

So high are the stakes that there is likely to be intense pressure on leaders to make public pronouncements one way or another. And they may well fear the consequences of not speaking more than they fear the consequences of speaking.

There may be another question to consider around these dynamics, which is that there appears to be a growing trend of increased transparency within the ANC during its election season.

It may be important for the party to ask if this is necessarily a bad thing. For a start, in the past, the difficulty of making predictions was definitely not a good thing.

ANC Leadership Race: Transparency v. Opacity

And there are many positives to transparency. The more people in the party say and the more information is in the public, the less scope there is for smoke-filled backroom skullduggery. There is surely less scope for people to be cutting deals with different groups and then betraying them at the last moment.

To put it another way, it may make it harder for someone like Deputy President David Mabuza to appear to be supporting one grouping and then betray them at the last moment, the way he appeared to do in 2017.

In other words, more transparency should lead to a cleaner race with less lying.

It may also lead to less scope for shocks. For example, it is pretty clear that, barring any major shocks, Ramaphosa will have a second term as ANC leader. It is also growing more likely, again because of the public statements by provincial leaders, that Mashatile will be elected deputy leader.

This predictability is surely a good thing; it means that there can be no huge tension just ahead of the conference, and little scope for shock when the final announcements are made.

It may also be important for the candidates themselves, because they too will have more information about how their campaigns are doing.

For example, it now appears unlikely that Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma is going to garner any substantial support. This appears to have been confirmed by the fact that the eThekwini region has publicly said it will support Mkhize, meaning that KZN is just not into her anymore. She can now decide whether to press on or pull out.

Meanwhile, Mkhize can also decide on what to do. He can decide to continue simply because he knows that eThekwini (and perhaps KZN) will support him, or decide that the public statements of other provinces show that he is unlikely to win.

There are other concerns about Motlanthe’s letter. If, for example, it is ignored, what will that do for the legitimacy of his entire structure? Could it lead to other rules being broken by other people? And what will he do then?

But, in the meantime, this tension between transparency and the ANC’s rules is likely to lead to a more open contestation. This process may now be unstoppable. DM