Road to 2024: Zukile Majova discusses the leadership bid of the ANC’s Tourism Minister Lindiwe Sisulu, a dark horse whose stock has risen since her failed bid in 2017.
Tourism Minister Lindiwe Sisulu has never shied away from presenting herself for a leadership position in the ANC.
And up until now no one really took her seriously.
Her presidential campaign ahead of the 2017 ANC elective conference had no chance in hell.
She was up against Cyril Ramaphosa, known by many as Nelson Mandela’s chosen one and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma was the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) proxy candidate.
This time however things have changed; she’s the most credible female candidate vying for the ANC top job or a seat in the Top 6.
She is the clear front-runner candidate of the ANCWL which has already forced the ANC to concede that three members of its six national office bearers shall be women.
So far she’s created an impression that she’s running her own race independent of the two main camps – the Jacob Zuma camp and the Ramaphosa camp – in the ANC.
Her strategy is to emerge as a compromise candidate at the December elective conference or to use her numbers to demand the position of deputy president from either of the front runners.
Sisulu presents herself as pragmatic while she is a populist, having led a proposal at the recent ANC policy conference that suggested rapists should be chemically castrated.
At age 68, the daughter of struggle veterans Walter and Albertina Sisulu is no longer a political spring chicken.
She brings to the table almost 30 years of experience in government after she was elected into the first democratic Parliament at age 28 back in 1994.
Her track record is long – minister of housing (2004 to 2009), minister of defence and military veterans (2009 to 2012), minister of public service and administration from 2012 to 2014; minister of human settlements, water and sanitation from 2014 to 2021 and now minister of tourism.
With no criminal charges of any kind against her, Sisulu is well received in all provinces and her campaign is gathering steam.
In recent weeks she has been afforded important platforms to address on behalf of the ANC.
These include the Govan Mbeki Memorial Lecture at the University of Fort Hare (24 August), leading the Peace and Stability March in Soshanguve (20 August), and had a warm welcome at the ANCWL’s event at the Germiston Civic Centre this week.
