Gangster State

at Luthuli House in early 2018 , after which the controversy over the
uncounted votes died down.^35
But mere days after news broke of Mchunu’s move to the ANC’s
headquarters, a fresh scandal engulfed the party. The Mail & Guardian
revealed that the Maluti-a-Phofung municipality, stronghold of
Magashule ally Vusi Tshabalala, had suddenly appointed about 200
new ‘assistant general workers’ the previous December. Some of these
new ‘employees’ were also Nasrec delegates from branches in the
Maluti-a-Phofung region. Four of them told the newspaper that they
scored the jobs in exchange for supporting Dlamini-Zuma, and that
they received their first salaries a day before the conference kicked off.
Others claimed their appointments were in no way related to Nasrec
and strongly denied that it was a ‘jobs for votes’ scandal.^36
A senior political figure provided me with a list of the Maluti-a-
Phofung region’s Nasrec delegates. There were about fifty of them
representing thirty-six branches. I found the names of twelve on a list
of municipal workers fired by the Maluti-a-Phofung municipality in
May 2018 , after an investigation by the provincial Department of
Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs. Most of them said
they could not talk to me without permission from their branches. One
of them denied that any of the Maluti-a-Phofung workers who attended
Nasrec voted for the Dlamini-Zuma slate in exchange for a job. He
claimed that the allegation was ‘political propaganda’ from the
province’s anti-Magashule faction, and that their employment at the
municipality had been ‘unfairly terminated’. But a delegate from
another branch who also scored a municipal job sang a different tune.
This person claimed that he had been instructed to vote not only for
Dlamini-Zuma, but also for ‘the full slate’, which of course included