Cape Argus - Floyd Shivambu, the controversial former ANC Youth League spin doctor and commissar of the newly launched Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), says the ANC government has dropped the baton passed to it by Nelson Mandela and it is time for power to be taken from the ruling party.
Defending Mandela a year later against an accusation in an anonymous letter that he sold out by distorting the Freedom Charter, Shivambu said Mandela had always been a champion of the document adopted in Kliptown in 1955 .
Shivambu wrote in his online defence of Mandela, that Mandela had realised that the time was not ripe for nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industries and had made a tactical retreat to facilitate a peaceful transition from apartheid.
“Nelson Mandela handed over the baton to the new generation of leaders and reminded them that the strategic mission of the ANC is attainment of all Freedom Charter objectives,” Shivambu wrote.
However, the ANC had demonstrated at Mangaung last year it was incapable of “giving practical meaning and coherence to the Freedom Charter”, he said.
Conditions had changed since Mandela’s term in office “because the black majority has the political power, legitimacy and capacity to transfer wealth to the ownership of the people as a whole”.
Political Bureau