INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPERS

ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe. Photo: Sizwe Ndingane

The ANC will use its centenary celebrations next year to remind South Africans that it played the central role in the Struggle, says secretary-general Gwede Mantashe. He was briefing the media on Wednesday on decisions at the four-day meeting of the party’s national executive committee (NEC) that ended on Monday.

Next year will be packed with political activity as the ruling party will also hold its third policy conference in May and end the year with the elective national conference in Mangaung, in the Free State.

The ANC’s alliance partners, Cosatu and the SACP, will also hold elective conferences next year.

Socialist International, the association of 162 social democratic, socialist and labour parties, will hold its conference in South Africa in June.

“In celebrating its centenary, the ANC will be hosting year-long mother-of-all celebrations that will be a lasting legacy for generations to come,” the party said.

The celebrations will begin with three-day festivities starting on January 6 and end with the opening of the ANC’s national conference on December 16, when the party will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launching of Umkhonto we Sizwe, its armed wing.

“We are making this point because half the time the debates that are in the public domain today always pretend as if there were no wars of resistance, wars of dispossession,” Mantashe said.

“Sometimes we behave as if there was no apartheid.”

He said the centenary celebrations were an opportunity to connect to history, because “any nation that had no history was like a tree with no roots”.

ANC leaders also decried the erosion of discipline within the party.

In a thinly veiled reference to the recent attack on Botswana’s ruling party by the ANC Youth League, the ANC said its failure to act against all acts of ill-discipline would result in the party losing respect.

Mantashe said one example of lax discipline had been the decision by some provinces to call for open debate on the election of leaders.

This ran counter to a previous NEC decision that was reiterated at the weekend meeting, in which the ANC called on members not to “undermine the established nomination procedures and practices”.

Mantashe said the ANC did not talk of succession. “We are a democratic movement, we elect leadership. We don’t have heirs to the throne. Therefore there is nothing called succession in the ANC.” - Political Bureau