Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma had been the head of the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa, but in mid-2016 she announced that she would not stand for a second term, and she returned to South Africa in early 2017. She also received endorsements as early as January 2017, from the ANC Women's League, and on some accounts her supporters had been "lobbying openly" for her candidacy during 2016. She was also later endorsed by the ANC Youth League and the Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans' Association. Dlamini-Zuma's campaign, under the banner #WeAreReady, centred on land redistribution, reform at the South African Reserve Bank, and economic transformation generally. Indeed, the ANC faction to which she was aligned was, and still is, sometimes referred to as the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction. "Radical economic transformation" was a longstanding policy slogan of the ANC, but was revived by Zuma in 2017 and subsequently was sometimes used by his allies to defend "rent-seeking practices" and the influence of the Gupta family. Thus, whereas Ramaphosa was taken as the anti-Zuma candidate, Dlamini-Zuma was seen as strongly aligned with her ex-husband and his allies.
