who were driving the bakkies confirmed that Ace had ordered them to
take the meat up north,’ Marshoff said. ‘That is when I decided to fire
Ace. This is what Ace does, he buys people’s support and he uses
government resources to do that.’
Dumbfounded by these revelations, I endeavoured to find out more
about Magashule’s alleged theft of state-owned cattle. A long-serving
staff member at Glen College confirmed the incident. ‘If I remember
correctly, there were about thirty-two cattle that were slaughtered, and
the meat was taken to a political event somewhere up north,’ he told
me.
Magashule’s habit of abusing the college’s resources apparently
continued after he became premier. ‘It became quite normal for them to
fetch or slaughter cattle here when there were political funerals or other
political events,’ this source told me in August 2018. ‘It is a scandal
because it is the state’s property, not theirs to just take. It has since
become less common [after Magashule’s departure from the province].
They have only come to fetch two [cattle] so far this year.’
Marshoff, meanwhile, took the cattle incident and some of
Magashule’s other shortcomings as MEC for agriculture to the national
leadership and asked them if she could fire him. ‘Apart from the cattle
thing, his department was generally in a mess,’ she explained. ‘There
was no coordination, he sometimes failed to attend ExCo meetings and
he didn’t submit the necessary reports for his department.’
She told Mbeki that she could not work with Magashule, and the
president agreed that she needed to remove him. ‘It caused a lot of
problems for me in the ANC, seeing as I had dared to remove the all-
powerful Ace,’ recalled Marshoff.
After being booted out of the Department of Agriculture, Magashule
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