Tuesday kicked off with heated drama in South Africa’s political arena when a scathing open letter, reportedly penned by suspended ANC Secretary-General Ace Magashule for the attention of former president Thabo Mbeki, surfaced on social media.
Ace Magashule open letter to Thabo Mbeki: Here’s what he said
In doing our due diligence, we found no traces of this open letter linking to the ANC’s suspended Secretary-General. However, social media has digested the contents of the script and boy, was it a hard bullet to bite for Mbeki.
Magashule reportedly accused the former president of being the “confirmed face of a campaign to denigrate, insult and adjudicate on me.”
“You do so in lecture sense as one who purportedly had apparent foresight and prophetic revelation long before others as you are pontificating in the glee of ‘I was right on Ace,'” the open letter read.
The suspended SG went on to reportedly pull Mbeki off his high horse as a perfect allegory of righteousness, quoting Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe as allegedly once saying, “Mbeki must stop pretending they left things in the ANC in order, we are still mopping up their mess.”
Was this a response to Mbeki’s comments on Magashule?
Magashule further went on to bash Mbeki as a cadre who allegedly used the ANC to define his own career ambitions.
Referencing a recent speech Mbeki gave at an ANC gathering in the Eastern Cape, where he claimed that he never saw Magashule fit to occupy the Premier of Free State position, Magashule reportedly blasted the former president as a self-loathing leader who was always envious of any figure that was favoured by the public more than him.
“Comrade your entitlement to act and speak as if the epitome of the ANC leadership is not a new practice on your part. The earliest signs of this behaviour manifested as far back as 1987 with your engagements with apartheid political party leaders. There is no question that many in the ANC leadership rank expressed discomfort with these unilateral actions of someone who was not leading the ANC as president but arrogated a right to usurp the collective leadership then already. History has no blank spaces,” Magashule scathingly noted.
A few low-blows were added here and there by Magashule. The suspended SG even went as far as reportedly reminding Mbeki that his own father, the late Govan, held reservations about his son leading South Africa into a democracy, a feat that was eventually achieved by the late former president Nelson Mandela.
The letter went on to recall Mbeki’s blunders as president, including his failure to allow land access to the poor and the epic HIV/AIDS controversy.
Mbeki, at the time this article was published, had not furnished a response to this open letter. Swisher Post News contacted the ANC to ascertain the origins of this letter and get comment from the party but a response was not returned to us.
