“There is no leader at the December elective conference that would emerge without signing a pact with the devil.”

This was the strong assertion made by former member of parliament and chairperson of the portfolio committee on public service, Dr Makhosi Khoza, on Tuesday night.

Khoza was delivering the 11th Annual Helen Joseph lecture at the University of Johannesburg.

The lecture was entitled A Cry for Leadership: Social Cohesion, Reconciliation and Prosperity for all South Africans.

Khoza said the outcome of the African National Congress's (ANC's) much awaited December elective conference was going to be an outcome of a “gate-keeping process”.

She said when a society was led by leaders who unashamedly defended looting, corruption and breakdown of critical institutions such as the Office of the Public Protector, the South African Broadcasting Corporation and Eskom among others, then the country was in a serious leadership crisis.

“We are in trouble,” said Khoza.

Patronage and nepotism had become the ANC’s policy, she said.

“It is normal to help yourself to the public purse and no one gets punished.”

‘Mighty hands of the youth’

She questioned why South Africans should give the ANC another chance in 2019 when it disregarded the people’s calls for Zuma to resign.

“Never before has the future of South Africa rested in the mighty hands of the youth, black or white, female or male…”

She said the 2019 elections would not be based on struggle credentials because most of the voters were born after apartheid and were mostly youth.

“These young South Africans must know that the future of South Africa is solely in their hands.”

In hindsight Khoza said it was only a matter of time before the ANC disintegrated “because, in time, it began to assume a family lineage character and this opens the ANC to the risk of nepotism that would snowball this politics of patronage”.

During her resignation speech at Liliesleaf Farm, in Rivonia, north of Johannesburg, Khoza said that she had been inundated with calls from members of the ANC who told her they believed the party could self-correct.

Before her decision to leave the ANC, Khoza had been criticised by some members of the party for speaking out against Zuma.

She was also hauled before a disciplinary hearing by the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal after she announced that she would vote according to her conscience in a motion of no confidence against Zuma in Parliament.