Gangster State

Lodge attributed the Magashule camp’s victory to renewed branch-
level organisation in northern towns like Sasolburg, in the goldfields
around Welkom and in far-flung QwaQwa.^29 But the northern faction’s
consolidation of its branch-level support base was accompanied by
rumours of voting irregularities.^30
According to sources involved in the party’s provincial structures back
then, there were indications that some branches in the northern region
had made use of ‘ghost members’ to increase the number of delegates
the north could send to the conference. ‘We found that there were
members in a branch in Welkom who were fully paid up, but when we
checked, they were people who had been dead for a long time,’ said
one source.
According to this former ANC leader, they managed to track down a
woman whose dead son had signed the attendance register for a branch
meeting during which delegates were elected to attend the provincial
conference. ‘This old lady told us that if her dead son was still
haunting branch meetings, he could at least pop in at home to greet his
parents,’ he told me.
Although banished to Cape Town, Magashule could now start
reclaiming the levers of power his faction had lost under Lekota and
Matsepe-Casaburri. The new PEC ensured that Lekota’s foes,
including Mayekiso, were once again appointed to the Free State’s
executive council.^31
Come 1999 , Magashule must have felt sure that the time had finally
come for him to be appointed premier. After all, he was the ruling
party’s chairperson in the Free State, and the ANC had been very clear
that it desired one person to lead both the provincial party and
government. His supporters had been calling him the ‘premier in