SOUTH AFRICA:Senior African National Congress (ANC) official Prof Kader Asmal has shaken up the presidential succession race by nominating Cyril Ramaphosa to be the ruling party's next leader.
Breaking ranks with many of his ANC colleagues, he said yesterday that neither of the two frontrunners for the post - party president Thabo Mbeki and deputy president Jacob Zuma - was "relevant" to the prevailing public mood.
Prof Asmal, who lived during the 1970s and 1980s in exile in Dublin where he ran the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, said he hoped "a thousand" ANC branches would back Mr Ramaphosa at December's leadership selection convention.
He stressed, however, "I'm not a campaign manager. I don't know if Cyril Ramaphosa wants to be a candidate or not, but I am using my right as a member of the party to nominate him in the hope that he will be next leader of the party and the next president of South Africa. Neither of the candidates which have been mentioned publicly to date are relevant to the mood that is in the country," he said.
Mr Ramaphosa, a highly respected former trade unionist, who was chief negotiator for the ANC during the transition to democracy, has not held a political office since he lost the 1997 race for the presidency to Mr Mbeki.
He has since become a successful businessman and has strengthened his international reputation through work such as that in Northern Ireland, where he was an inspector of IRA arms dumps.
Prof Asmal, a former cabinet minister and currently a member of the ANC's national executive committee, nominated Mr Ramaphosa at his local party Cape Town branch, an influential one that includes five cabinet ministers. The nomination was supported by a large majority.
While none of the cabinet ministers was present to vote, one of the five - arts and culture minister Pallo Jordan - suggested later that the party could best be served by "people from a later generation".
The comment has been widely interpreted as a rejection of both Mr Mbeki and Mr Zuma.
Roughly 4,000 ANC delegates, representing branches across South Africa, will decide the leadership issue at a party conference in Limpopo. While ANC tradition deems that candidates do not campaign openly, Mr Mbeki and Mr Zuma have been rallying support nationwide through rival groups of supporters.
Businessman Tokyo Sexwale has put himself forward as a possible "compromise" candidate, but his campaign is increasingly waning. Some of his backers are seemingly switching their allegiance to his close friend and colleague Mr Ramaphosa, who at present continues to deny any interest in taking on the job.
Prof Asmal said such denials were in accordance with party etiquette, adding that he had not been in direct contact with Mr Ramaphosa about the nomination. "The ANC does not have campaigns," he said, with a smile. "It's a bit like Fianna Fáil where leaders used to emerge, without an actual contest."
Prof Asmal went public on his views on the presidency after delivering a hard-hitting speech in Johannesburg at the weekend in which he criticised those who regarded the ANC as a platform for "personal ambition".