At the ANC's
52nd National Conference, held in December 2007 in
Polokwane, Mantashe was elected as ANC secretary-general. He succeeded Kgalema Motlanthe, who was also his predecessor at the NUM. He had stood on a slate of candidates aligned to successful presidential candidate
Jacob Zuma; The opposing candidate,
Mosiuoa Lekota, stood on a slate aligned to outgoing president
Thabo Mbeki; Mantashe received 2,378 votes to Lekota's 1,432. Among his first tasks upon taking office was managing the fall-out from the 52nd National Conference, which intensified divisions between supporters of Mbeki and supporters of Zuma. In September 2008, it was Mantashe who announced that the ANC National Executive Committee had decided to "recall" Mbeki from his office as
President of South Africa. In the aftermath, when Lekota and
Sam Shilowa broke away from the ANC to establish the
Congress of the People (COPE), Mantashe oversaw the ANC's programme to compete with COPE and recoup support lost to the new party in the
2009 general election.'''''' In the summation of journalist Stephen Grootes, "What threatened to become a split [in the ANC] became only a splinter", which Grootes credited partly to Mantashe's management of the situation. Mantashe was re-elected to a second term at the
53rd National Conference in
Mangaung in December 2012. On that occasion, again running alongside Zuma, he beat
Fikile Mbalula in a landslide, receiving 3,058 votes against Mbalula's 908.
SACP chairmanship In tandem with his ANC responsibilities, Mantashe served the remainder of his five-year term as SACP national chairperson, although his dual roles sometimes caused tensions in the Tripartite Alliance. In December 2009, supporters of ANC Youth League president
Julius Malema called for Mantashe to choose between the two positions after Malema and
Tony Yengeni were booed at an SACP gathering in Polokwane. The ANC Youth League accused Mantashe of failing to defend Malema, as they argued the ANC secretary-general should, because his dual roles gave rise to a conflict of interest.''''''
Irvin Jim of the
National Union of Metalworkers defended Mantashe, saying that Malema had taken an "anti-Cosatu and anti-SACP posture, a stance that is unprovoked" and that "Mantashe is being singled out and targeted because he is a communist". At the next SACP congress, held at the
University of Zululand in July 2012, Mantashe declined a nomination to stand for re-election as chairperson. In his outgoing speech to the congress, he said that he was stepping down on practical grounds, saying, "Being an official in both parties is just impossible. It leads a person to be an absentee chairperson in the party. That is a disservice to the party". However, he said he was "grateful" for the experience, having gained "a broader horizon from which we could observe each individual component of our revolution" and emerged with "a deeper understanding of the contradictions in the movement". – was viewed as wielding particular power in the office, especially during his second term.''''
Described by the Mail & Guardian'' as "cantankerous",
Richard Calland labelled him "the ultimate political traffic warden inside and outside the ANC". His tenure lasted throughout Zuma's two
terms in the national presidency, which were marred by allegations that his administration had been
captured by business interests. Mantashe's critics alleged that he was a key figure in the ANC's efforts to shield Zuma from accountability. In 2013, for example, after the notorious
Waterkloof Air Base landing, Mantashe maintained that the nature of Zuma's relationship with the
Gupta family was not ANC business. Similarly, he was a prominent figure in the ANC's successful campaign to thwart the multiple
motions of no confidence that opposition parties lodged against Zuma in
Parliament. In June 2017, the
Constitutional Court ruled in response to an application by the
United Democratic Movement that Members of Parliament should
vote with their conscience in motions of no confidence and that the
Speaker of the National Assembly therefore had the power to prescribe a secret ballot in such motions. Former ANC MP
Makhosi Khoza later said that Mantashe had told the party's representatives to ignore the Constitutional Court's advice and that, in Khoza's summation, "anyone who sought to uphold the rule of law will be severely punished". Indeed, Mantashe openly warned in 2017 that ANC MPs who voted in favour of motions of no confidence risked disciplinary action, including dismissal; he said that the ANC did not subscribe to the notion of conscience votes in such matters. Mantashe told the
Daily Maverick in June 2017 that ANC support for a motion of no confidence in Zuma would be still more destabilising than the events that led to the formation of COPE in 2008: "The recall of Thabo Mbeki will be like a Sunday picnic." Mantashe continued to defend this view years later, telling the
Zondo Commission, a public inquiry into state capture, that
party discipline on such matters was essential to ensuring the stability of the ANC and therefore the stability of the government and country. He argued that allowing the party's own representatives to vote against their leader would lead to serious division and political crisis, and would therefore be tantamount to
cutting off your nose to spite your face. He said that the ANC allowed conscience votes on other issues, but: ...on political matters that affect the heart of the ANC, we cannot allow a free-for-all. The ANC is a political party with policies. People who go to parliament on an ANC
list understand those policies and go on the basis of implementing those policies. During Zuma's presidency, Mantashe's primary concern was to obstruct parliamentary no-confidence motions lodged by opposition parties. He was much more sanguine about the prospect of Zuma being removed from the ANC presidency – and thereafter from the national presidency – by his own party through internal ANC mechanisms. He was open in admitting that Zuma faced internal dissent By mid-2017, he said openly that state capture was "a reality", He told international press that revelations of state capture, involving ANC politicians, were damaging the party's reputation, and he called for the establishment of a judicial inquiry into the allegations at a time when Zuma was resisting such calls. Observers first noticed tensions two years later, after the controversial
December 2015 cabinet reshuffle in which Zuma replaced Finance Minister
Nhlanhla Nene with
Des van Rooyen. In what was described as a turning point for Mantashe, the ANC responded coldly to the reshuffle, When the new Finance Minister,
Pravin Gordhan,
faced fraud charges three months later, Mantashe was supportive of Gordhan, Gordhan was sacked in
another controversial reshuffle in October 2017, and
News24's sources said that Mantashe had been among the party leaders who had attempted to persuade Zuma to retain Gordhan. Mantashe confirmed that he had disagreed with Zuma, saying that "for the first time", Zuma had had to invoke his constitutional prerogative as national president to overrule the ANC on the composition of the cabinet. This and similar reversals led
social media to devise the verb "Mantash", popularised by Julius Malema, to describe such backtracking. Yet when Zuma sacked Blade Nzimande of the SACP from the cabinet in October 2017, Mantashe was again publicly critical: he said that the party had not been consulted, called the decision a "pity", and warned that frequent reshuffles could destabilise the government. By the end of 2017, journalists suspected that Mantashe's personal relationship with Zuma had seriously deteriorated. in 2022
Nasrec conference and aftermath At the ANC's
54th National Conference in December 2017, Mantashe did not stand for re-election as secretary-general but instead was elected as the ANC's national chairperson. He beat
Nathi Mthethwa in a vote, receiving 2,418 votes against Mthethwa's 2,269.
Ace Magashule was narrowly elected to succeed him as secretary-general. For some time before the election, Mantashe was viewed as broadly aligned to the winning presidential candidate, NUM founder and deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa, who had publicly announced that Mantashe was his preferred candidate for the chairmanship. In turn, Mantashe had endorsed Ramaphosa's presidential run, to the consternation of Ramaphosa's opponents in the ANC leadership; he argued that the ANC had a tradition of leadership succession by the deputy president, which he said should be maintained in the interest of stability. Mantashe
Tweeted lightheartedly that, having vacated the full-time ANC secretariat, he was "unemployed" and looking for a job. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the conference, Ramaphosa's supporters set about effecting Zuma's recall from the Presidency of South Africa, threatening to support a parliamentary motion of no confidence if he did not resign voluntarily. Mantashe said at a political rally in
Butterworth, "When you resist the call to resign you leave us no choice but to let you fry in the vote of no-confidence motion because it means you do not respect the organisation [the ANC]". == Minister of responsible for Mineral Resources: 2018–present ==