Members of the ANC’s Provincial Executive Committee (PEC) were on Tuesday held up in their offices for hours by a crowd of ANC branch members who stormed the ANC provincial offices off St George’s Mall.
Shortly after midday, after about two hours of protests, police were called to calm the crowd. Talks resumed, but late in the afternoon police were called in again and some angry ANC members were removed from the building. A crowd continued to toyi-toyi outside until they were forced to disperse by the police.
The incident prompted ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe to comment that violent outbursts around the finalisation of the ANC’s election lists were “a little bit of a hiccup” and “disappointments of the democratic process”.
The drama unfolded when at least 150 ANC members from 16 provincial branches refused to let six PEC members leave their offices over disagreements regarding the branch candidate lists for the May 18 local government election. The six included provincial secretary-general Songezo Mjongile and Dullah Omar regional secretary Jay Tyhalisisu.
About an hour after branch members stormed the Sahara Building in Thibault Square, one PEC member called out that he needed to go to the toilet. “Use a bucket”, was the answer thrown back at him.
The ANC members, situated in a pedestrian walkway outside the offices, the foyer and boardroom, sang protest songs and chanted insults.
The door to the ANC office on the fourth floor was damaged when the crowd tried to force their way inside.
The ANC branch members accused Mjongile and his executive committee of changing the candidate lists of city ward councillors provided by the branches for the upcoming local government election, and putting forward their own list of preferred candidates.
The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) requires that the lists be submitted by Friday. Branches submitted their candidate lists earlier this month but upon receiving correspondence from the PEC notifying them who was standing for election, they noticed that candidates had been changed.
Tuesday’s meeting was a follow-up to a meeting last Thursday, branch member Amanda Mvana said.
Things became uglier inside the boardroom when Tyhalisisu told branch members, who were demanding to see the full complement of nine PEC members, that three PEC members were not answering their phones and were not in the building.
It emerged later that the three absent PEC members had been hiding elsewhere in the building.
The crowd demanded that Tyhalisisu phone Mantashe, who in return told Tyhalisisu to deal with the matter at provincial level.
Branch members insulted Tyhalisisu, accusing him of “being used by the DA”, and he was not allowed out of the overflowing boardroom.
A group of women blocked the doors and told him: “You are not going anywhere until we get the answers.”
The crowd demanded that the names of those they had voted for at branch level be submitted to the IEC as those who would stand for election.
Once police arrived, Mjongile, who had been barricaded in his office on the fourth floor, was escorted to address the crowd in the boardroom. He was shouted down and booed, however.
“We are dealing with this issue per branch because each branch has its own differences,” Mjongile said, before instructing journalists to leave the building.
Mvana said: “We are not going to allow IEC officials to come in our ward if this situation is not solved. We demand that the name that we voted for be reinstated.
“If they cannot reverse the situation there are not going to be elections in our wards.”
Mvana said it was not the first time that candidates voted for by the branches had “been put aside by the PEC”.
The wards in which the candidate nominations have allegedly been changed include wards five, six, 13, 16, 20, 33, 37, 39, 41, 42, 45, 75, 85, 87, 93 and 96.
Nontuthuzelo Dlongo-dlongo said she was elected to run as a candidate for Ward 45, in Gugulethu, Manenberg and Nyanga, at an ANC meeting on February 6. She beat her nearest competitor by 70 votes, but another candidate’s name was selected, she said.
“They changed the names,” Sipho Grootboom, 27, an ANC Youth League member from Ward 40, said.
“I love the ANC, but if they don’t listen we will make the Western Cape ungovernable,” Grootboom said.
A letter from the provincial Cape Agulhas and Overberg district ANC branches, addressed to Mantashe, read: “For the first time in our history, there is a strong sense of defiance developing among the communities in Cape Agulhas zone because of the imposition of the three candidate ward councillors.”
Mjongile said that the party would not be intimidated by “ill-disciplined” and “rogue” members.
“These people were misled by people who have huge ambitions to be ward councillors,” Mjongile said.
“The ANC condemns this kind of action because those members know that there is due process that is followed when there are grievances. The ANC will take action against those ill-disciplined members for breaking the organisation’s property and bringing the party into disrepute.”
Meanwhile, Mantashe told journalists in Johannesburg that the party would submit its lists by Wednesday. Mantashe said that Tuesday’s disruptions, as well as other incidents reported around list processes in Mpumalanga, the North West, the Free State and the Eastern Cape, were “emerging from what you would call the disappointments of the democratic process”.
“Throughout that process, there are people whose ambitions get watered down, and people react in this way.”
He attributed the protests to the ANC’s decision to involve communities in the vetting of candidates for the first time, adding that the DA’s process of using an electoral college was “the easiest thing to do”, but “not as democratic as the ANC’s process”.
“We don’t want our communities to meet their candidates at the poll for the first time,” he said.
Mantashe apologised to those who had not made it on to the candidate lists, saying “expressing your anger is also a healing process”.
He said the ANC would “never stop people from expressing their feelings”, but added that the party would “manage” those feelings. But he said party members who incited violence after they did not make it on to the party’s lists were “the wrong candidates for public representatives”. - Cape Times