Durban - The entire top leadership of the ANC had lost direction, former cabinet minister Jay Naidoo said in Durban on Tuesday night.
The former ANC activist described the growing calls for President Jacob Zuma to resign as pointless when the whole of the ruling party was facing “tremendous difficulty”.
Speaking at the Kendra Business Forum political dialogue gathering, Naidoo, the founding Cosatu general secretary, said the lobbyists of the Zuma Must Fall campaign acted as if “one individual determined the future of our country”.
“I think there is a tremendous difficulty the ANC is facing now and, yes, at the national level, we have lost direction. We are disappointing our people in terms of delivering what we promised them in 1994,” he said.
Naidoo was the minister of telecommunications under president Nelson Mandela.
He said he was no longer involved in politics and that he had no “plan to rebuild another Cosatu”.
He said things were fundamentally wrong with the political system in that many of the government leaders were serving their own interests instead of the people and the constitution.
“I think for the new political elite, many of them see going into public service as a business opportunity rather than serving the interest of our citizens,” said Naidoo.
He called for an overhaul of the political system to “improve accountability, improve transparency, to make sure that our public institutions work and those that lead it have the constitution in mind”.
“Ultimately the responsibility of public elected individuals, and of the state officials running all our institutions, is to the constitution and the people, not the political party of the political leader leading it,” Naidoo said.
He said although the ANC had always had divisions, the current rifts were serious and would badly affect the country.
“I think those divisions are going to come to the fore, and those divisions have an impact, not just for the people who are in the ANC, they have impact on all of us,” he said.
Naidoo said he had come from an ANC that thought of the future of the citizens of a united country, that was non-racial, non-sexist and democratic.
The Mercury