Gangster State

The Regime Changers campaigned hard and were convinced that they
would unseat Magashule and his allies. Across the province, the party’s
members attended branch general meetings, where it was decided
which delegates each branch would send to the provincial conference.
This is the very foundation of the ANC’s internal democratic process,
but there was trouble on the horizon. The Regime Changers were
confident that they enjoyed the support of branches in four of the Free
State ANC’s five regions.^19 However, they underestimated the lengths
their opponents were willing to go to in order to quell the anti-
Magashule movement.
About a month before the conference, provincial secretary Besani sent
letters to then national secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, some
members of the ANC’s NEC deployed to the province, and the
Magashule-led PEC in which he highlighted ‘material irregularities’
that had occurred when the Free State’s branches chose their delegates
for the upcoming conference. Among the problems listed were
widespread ‘manipulation of the membership numbers in specific
branches’; ‘exclusion of bona fide delegates’; and ‘the establishment of
parallel structures and the decision to allow and sanction the
participation at the provincial conference of “delegates” from parallel
structures’.^20 These complaints, along with other grievances, would
form the basis of the Regime Change group’s soon-to-be-launched legal
bid.
According to the ANC’s Membership Audit Guidelines, the
membership lists compiled at the branch general meetings had to be
subjected to pre-audits by the PEC or by each region’s Regional
Executive Committee. After that, the National Audit Team had to
determine which of the branches were in good standing before