Durban - The ANC in KwaZulu-Natal piled on the pain for the troubled NFP at its closing election rally in Durban on Sunday, welcoming scores of NFP members, including one of the party’s founding leaders.
This comes as the NFP is licking its wounds after being disqualified from Wednesday’s poll in municipalities across the country, with the exception of the Nquthu Municipality.
Last week, the ANC welcomed 15 candidate councillors from other parties, stepping up the psychological warfare ahead of the vote.
Announcing the new members at its Siyanqoba Rally at the Moses Mabhida Stadium, ANC provincial chairman, Sihle Zikalala, named NFP youth movement secretary-general, Maria Tshabalala, and eThekwini councillor and founding leader, Wiseman Mcoyi, as its latest recruits, along with scores of their colleagues from the student and youth movements.
The group was paraded before the crowd, before being given yellow party T-shirts, which they promptly donned before joining the “dabbing” dance, a hip-hop routine that has become something of a craze at ANC political rallies.
In a short address to the new members, AU chairwoman, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, said: “We welcome you with warm hands.”
Zikalala said the ANC respected the NFP members, and had worked with the NFP.
“We are charting the way forward. Let them (NFP members) vote for the ANC,” he said.
Speaking to the Daily News, Tshabalala said her defection was long overdue and was informed by the need to serve South Africans in a different political home.
“The decision is about politics so I just felt it is the right time to leave the NFP. I realise that the ANC will accommodate my vision as the country needs people to be counted in bringing solutions and not come up with problems,” she said.
While insisting her decision was not linked to the dim future facing the NFP after its disqualification, Tshabalala said: “Sooner or later, it will be finished politically.”
However, the future of the firebrand youth leader, employed as ministerial staff in the office of Zanele kaMagwaza-Msibi, NFP leader and Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, now hangs in the balance.
Ministerial appointments are usually based on a person’s political affiliation and are a prerogative of the political head.
Tshabala was adamant there was separation of party and government work.
“I was not appointed because of political affiliation. It was because I was capable. I will remain in the deputy minister’s office,” Tshabalala said.
Mcoyi said he quit the NFP because he felt he needed to take his vote elsewhere, rather than not vote at all.
“It is best to take a vote to a strong party than the Mickey Mouse parties. As a leader, I had to show the way to our members after many wondered what must they do as there will be nothing taking place in the NFP,” he said.
Mcoyi had, in the last year, been at loggerheads with party leaders after he and others took the party to court after they were summarily recalled as councillors.