When the ANC Skeletons March Out: “Animal Farm Politics; Are Some Skeletons Untouchable?

Commentary by Rev. Mo’hau Khumalo – The arrest of former Mpumalanga Premier and former Deputy Minister of Correctional Services, Thabang Makwetla, is not merely a judicial development – it is a historical and political marker that compels South Africa to re-examine the moral state of its ruling party.

It forces us to return to 2016, when Bathabile Dlamini, then Chairperson of the ANC Women’s League, declared openly before the nation: “All of us there in the NEC have smallanyana skeletons, and we don’t want to take them out because hell will break loose.”

That was not a slip of the tongue. It was a moment of rare candour – an unmasking of the inner culture of the ANC’s leadership. It was an admission that corruption and compromise were not isolated incidents but collective baggage carried by the top leadership of the party.

2016 and the Politics of Complicity

At that time, the ANC was already under immense strain. The Zuma presidency was facing increasing pressure from the Constitutional Court, civil society, and opposition parties. State capture allegations were swelling, and the cracks in governance were becoming unmanageable.

Bathabile’s statement was essentially a confession: renewal was impossible because too many leaders had dirt on each other. It revealed a pact of silence, a politics of mutual blackmail where leaders shielded each other out of fear that accountability for one could trigger the collapse of many.

The so-called Integrity Committee and the Renewal Program were born in that context. But the question today is whether they were designed as instruments of real change or simply as political shields to pacify the public while protecting the untouchables.

The Animal Farm Paradox

George Orwell’s allegory in Animal Farm is instructive here. The ANC claimed it was cleaning house, but the results suggest otherwise: some comrades were purged or sacrificed in the name of renewal, while others – equally or more compromised – were protected because of their political capital within the factional chessboard.

This selective justice created a paradox: the party that spoke of equality before the law became the custodian of inequality before accountability. Some were prosecuted; others were defended; still others were simply ignored. As the saying goes, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

The Makwetla Arrest: A Watershed or a Warning?

The arrest of Thabang Makwetla should therefore be seen as part of a larger unravelling. It is not just about an individual; it is about the slow but inevitable exposure of a system of complicity that has defined the ANC since the liberation struggle ended.

The real question is: is this the beginning of the “hell” that Bathabile warned about? Are the skeletons finally marching out of the cupboard, one arrest at a time? And if so, who will be next?

History teaches us that when systems rot from within, they often unravel not through deliberate reform but through collapse. The ANC had the chance in 2016 to confront the rot head-on. It chose instead to manage it, to paper over cracks, to preach renewal while protecting power.

Now, that neglected truth returns in the form of arrests, commissions, and public humiliation. Renewal imposed from the outside, through courts and investigations, is far more brutal than renewal owned from within.

Whose Skeletons Next?

Makwetla is not an isolated case. From the CR17 funding controversy, the Phala Phala dollars in the couch, the silenced and sealed documents of internal ANC dealings, to the enduring unresolved allegations surrounding senior figures like Gwede Mantashe and many others – South Africans know that the cupboards are not yet empty.

The tragedy is that Bathabile’s statement, once ridiculed, now reads like prophecy. The skeletons are not “smallanyana.” They are large, ugly, and nation-damaging. They have cost jobs, collapsed municipalities, bankrupted SOEs, and betrayed the trust of millions who still cling to the memory of a liberation movement rather than the reality of its corrupted present.

Conclusion: The Reckoning

The arrest of Thabang Makwetla is not just another case file in the courts of South Africa. It is a symbol of a deeper reckoning that the ANC cannot escape. The chickens – or rather, the skeletons – have come home to roost.

If the ANC had heeded Bathabile’s 2016 confession, if it had empowered its Integrity Committee genuinely, if it had pursued renewal without fear or favour, today the nation would not be holding its breath, wondering whose skeleton will emerge next.

But history is merciless. Renewal postponed is renewal denied. And when hell breaks loose, it consumes not only the guilty but also those who stood by and kept silent.

The ANC must now confront this era of reckoning. South Africa can no longer afford selective morality. Either all skeletons are exposed, or none of us are free from their stench.

Because indeed, when hell breaks loose, it spares no one and it does not choose it’s victim.

-✍🏾Rev.Mo’hau Khumalo
Political Writer & Commentator

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