employed by the Regime Change in its endeavour to dislodge the
current leadership from the state and party hegemony.^24
Furthermore, according to the paper, Magashule was not only the
target of an assassination plot, he was also the victim of an elaborate
smear campaign designed to tie his name to political assassinations:
The Weekly has been reliably informed by provincial intelligence
sources about plots being hatched to eliminate prominent political
rivals of the current provincial ANC leadership. The aim is to use such
assassinations to win public sympathy, and smear and discredit the
current provincial leadership, especially Ace Magashule.^25
At the time, the Mangaung metro was wracked by service-delivery
protests in the Thaba ’Nchu and Botshabelo areas outside
Bloemfontein. In its report, The Weekly claimed that the Regime
Change group had hijacked the residents’ legitimate grievances to
‘embarrass and discredit the incumbent provincial leaders’.^26
As the Free State provincial conference drew closer, The Weekly’s
reports on the Regime Change faction became wilder and more
unbelievable. ‘Terror campaign unmasked,’ screamed one of its
headlines from May 2012. In the article, the newspaper claimed it had
obtained a report compiled by the party’s Mangaung region
‘authenticating allegations of a nefarious plot involving violence,
intimidation, and formation of illegitimate ANC branches by Regime
Change leaders and members’. The Weekly insisted that the document
corroborated its earlier revelations about the Regime Change group’s
‘war room strategy’. One of the paper’s main sources for the article,
apart from the Mangaung region report, was ‘a key lobbyist close to
the Magashule re-election campaign’.^27