ANC may weigh call on conference

The ANC’s top six officials – headed by President Jacob Zuma – due to meet at Luthuli House on Monday are likely to consider a call for the party’s leadership elections to be postponed and for the Mangaung conference to become a national consultative meeting.

ANC spokesman Keith Khoza said that while he could not say so “conclusively”, he suspected that the top brass would discuss a six-page document that argued for the elections to be postponed in the light of the divisions threatening to tear the party apart.

The document, “ANC in Crisis: a proposal for a national consultative conference of the ANC”, is reportedly the work of the party’s commissariat, whose task it is to manage political education and cadre development.

It warns the ANC not to take a path to its “self-destruction”, arguing that this would be the consequence of leadership elections being held at a time when the party is riven with factions and riddled with corruption, incompetence in government and tenderpreneurship, The Independent on Sunday has reported.

The newspaper said the document had been sent to Zuma, ANC deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe, Gwede Mantashe, deputy secretary-general Thandi Modise, national chairwoman Baleka Mbete and treasurer Matthews Phosa.

“What drives people in an organisation that is in a state of chaos, ‘disintegrating’ and ‘about to implode’, to pursue with such heightened fervour and passionate zeal an elective conference that will, for all intents and purposes, lead to its ultimate demise and destruction?” The Independent on Sunday quoted the document as saying.

“Can anyone explain the rationale of an organisation that is conscious of its imminent disintegration and implosion and yet decides to ignore these dangers and opt instead for a route to self-destruction, only because its constitution requires that an elective conference be held at certain prescribed regular intervals?”

The commissariat, “like all true cadres of the ANC, must refuse to be part of that suicide pact”, the document was reported to say.

“When your house is on fire, you do not… debate the cause of the fire, nor do you set out to protect your room. You do what rational beings would do. You extinguish the fire and discuss the causes later.”

The Sunday Times quoted the authors of the document as saying their proposal had received wide support from former Umkhonto weSizwe members and rank-and-file ANC members.

It said the document proposed the ANC hold a national consultative conference, instead of leadership elections, as this would offer “the true membership of the ANC” the chance to reclaim branches, cleanse the party of corruption, nepotism and tribalism, and reassert the “supremacy” of the Freedom Charter.

The ANC has twice before held consultative conferences at crucial junctures in its history – in Morogoro, Tanzania, in 1969 and in Kabwe, Zambia, in 1985.

Asked about the commissariat and its standing in the party, Khoza said it comprised political commissars, selected from “national structures”, to drive political education in the ANC. It’s re-establishment had been discussed at the party’s national general council meeting in Durban in September last year, but he was unsure whether it had been “fully revived”.

As a result, he could not be certain of the standing of the document, Khoza said.

The idea had been for the commissariat to “look broadly” at issues in the ANC. “I am sure it is a matter that will go to the constitutional structures of the ANC… the officials, national working committee and national executive committee.”

Only special circumstances would dictate that a constitutional obligation such as an elective conference be delayed, Khoza said.

Asked whether the ANC’s top six officials were likely to discuss the document on Monday, he said: “I cannot say conclusively, but I suspect so.” - Political Bureau