waiting’,^32 and they were convinced that their man would finally get
the nod from the ANC’s top brass.
But Thabo Mbeki, who took over from Mandela as ANC president in
1997 , and as the man in charge of the country after the 1999 elections,
dashed these hopes. Mbeki, who clearly shared Mandela’s reservations
about Magashule, shocked the latter’s support base by appointing
Botshabelo local and NCOP member Winkie Direko as premier.
Like Lekota and Matsepe-Casaburri before her, Direko was labelled
by the Magashule camp as an outsider who had been imposed on the
Free State by a national leadership that chose to ignore the wishes of its
ground-level members. They went as far as calling her an ‘Mbeki
appointee’,^33 signalling that the ANC infighting in the province would
continue unabated.
But Direko was tough, and it quickly became clear that she would not
be intimidated by those who refused to accept her authority.
‘Magashule made life difficult for Winkie, just as he had done with
Terror and Ivy, but she did not take any nonsense from him,’ said a
Free State politician who was in the trenches during those heady days
of factional fighting.
By mid- 2000 , the ongoing conflict, which was driven in part by
allegations that the 1998 provincial conference had been rigged,
necessitated yet another drastic intervention from the ANC’s national
leadership. The NWC disbanded the Magashule-led PEC and
appointed an interim committee to lead the party in the province.^34
This body was led by Godfrey Mosala, a former official in the
provincial education department, and Noby Ngombane, who was later
shot dead in what is deemed to have been the most high-profile
assassination as a result of the province’s political discord (see Chapter
nora
(Nora)
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