ANTHONY BUTLER | PM27 campaign fuels debate over Motsepe’s future

ANC condemns ‘divisive’ campaign as party’s 2027 conference looms

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

March 06, 2026

Speculation refuses to die down that the 64-year-old mining magnate and president of the Confederation of African Football, Patrice Motsepe, might emerge as the technocratic saviour of the ANC at its December 2027 conference.

This idea, long circulating, has received a major boost with the appearance last week of a “PM27” campaign website urging South Africans to position the billionaire as a future leader. Motsepe has not endorsed the site but nor has he repudiated it.

On Monday, the ANC “unequivocally condemned” the PM27 campaign as “divisive” and “an attempt to derail the ANC from its historic mission and responsibilities”. The glorious movement called on “all those involved to desist immediately”.

While Motsepe is a very capable person, he has not in the past been strongly associated with politics. The late Nthato Motlana, black business pioneer and close confidant of Nelson Mandela, once counterposed one lacklustre captain of industry, Cyril Ramaphosa, to Motsepe, a “real businessman” who took on near-exhausted mines and combined low base salaries with profit sharing to generate huge profits.

For Motlana, Motsepe’s strength was precisely that he had “no connections with the ANC … his life is business”. Active ANC and communist party networks and the residual power of the union he created were crucial to Ramaphosa’s rise to the deputy presidency and then the presidency. Motsepe has no such linkages around which to build a political coalition.

It is sometimes claimed that Ramaphosa is pushing for Motsepe to succeed to the ANC and state presidencies, a notion based partly on the involvement of a few CR2017 campaigners in PM27 but also on a submerged belief that Africans are naturally nepotistic and get on handsomely with their in-laws — neither of which appears to be true of Ramaphosa and Motsepe.

Even if Ramaphosa was in favour of such a succession, the history of outgoing presidents handing over power to their preferred successors is poor: Jacob Zuma did not want him and Thabo Mbeki definitely did not want Zuma.

Motsepe’s chances are further exaggerated due to three wildly inaccurate suppositions. The first is that a billionaire can buy ANC conference votes. Even if one accepts that there may be some factual basis for this reprehensible stereotyping, delegates are not allowed to take cellphones into the voting booth and cannot prove which way they voted. Indeed, they can happily take money from all contenders without compromising their independence.

The second false supposition is that business folk are cleverer than politicians and can do their jobs far better if only they so choose. This multiracial and cross-cultural fantasy is especially widely espoused by rich businessmen who made their fortunes selling hair products.

It is true that Motsepe’s African Rainbow Minerals was a huge accomplishment, but he has never held elected office in national politics and has no experience managing the quite different complexity this world exhibits.

It is useful here to reflect on the brief political career of Roger Jardine, a former CEO of Aveng Group and Primedia and chair of FirstRand, who launched the inaptly named Change Starts Now movement in December 2023 to contest the 2024 national elections.

Boosted by huge donations from unusually public-spirited corporations, trailed by illustrious campaign managers, speechwriters’ obligatory flights of inspirational rhetoric scrolling relentlessly down his omnipresent teleprompters, Jardine’s campaign crashed and burned within weeks.

The third false supposition — since Ramaphosa is probably preparing to step down from the party leadership next year — is that “there is no one else”. But there will always be someone else and not just the lamentable frontrunners, Paul Mashatile and Fikile Mbalula, who has a better chance of winning than a rank political outsider and amateur.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.