Publications
Partners
KwaZulu-Natal remained on political tenterhooks this week as pressure mounted on newly appointed Premier Willies Mchunu to reshuffle his provincial cabinet to accommodate the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) in the province.
The death of Mchunu’s mother this week and her burial yesterday may have relieved some of the political pressure, but ANC sources say the ANCYL wants Mchunu to fill the two vacancies left by his move to the premier’s office, as well as six other positions, urgently.
The pressure is such that Mchunu, who is the ANC deputy provincial chairperson, is understood to have threatened to resign earlier this week in the face of pressure to axe sitting MECs, including Economic Development MEC Mike Mabuyakhulu, from the ANCYL.
While the public safety and transport portfolios, both of which Mchunu occupied, need to be filled, the ANCYL wants a wholesale removal of the MECs who backed former premier Senzo Mchunu (no relation) in his bid for re-election in November.
“The old man is under serious pressure to reshuffle now. These boys aren’t backing down,” said an ANC legislature member.
“We were told that he even threatened to resign. Willies is in a very tough spot. On the one hand, he needs to accommodate these boys because they worked so hard for Sihle [Zikalala, the ANC KwaZulu-Natal provincial chairperson]. On the other hand, he goes way back in the movement with people like Mike Mabuyakhulu. He also needs to keep a balance of skills, and dumping Mike is a problem,” he said.
Willies Mchunu, who last week publicly acknowledged the role of ANC eThekwini regional chairperson Zandile Gumede, a key backer of Zikalala, in getting him to contest the leadership on Zikalala’s slate, is understood to want to limit cabinet changes ahead of the elections in August.
Mchunu and the ANC are also facing a backlash from the SA Communist Party (SACP) in the province, of which he is a longstanding leader and a central committee member, and which he ditched to back Zikalala.
This week, the SACP in Durban said Mchunu’s actions showed that he “owes his current political existence to Zandile’s faction”.
It said that while Mchunu had always called for discipline and internal solutions to challenges, he had done the opposite.
“We listened to him, thinking about his wisdom as a cadre of our movement with unquestionable credentials.
“But little did we know that Willies would quickly practise exactly what he was criticising,” it said.
