Johannesburg - The ANC's 53rd national conference is not just about choosing leaders, the party's secretary general Gwede Mantashe said on Friday.
“This is not a conference about electing leadership as it is projected,” Mantashe said at a business briefing by The New Age, which was broadcast live on SABC2.
It is a conference about “grappling” with policies and putting together a leadership that will grapple with those polices, he said.
ANC policy head Jeff Radebe said the outcome of the conference would affect society as a whole.
Mantashe said the organisation was tightly-knit during the struggle against apartheid, but that once things opened up, “mosquitoes” with different objectives and started treating elections as life and death struggles.
Radebe said the conference would remove the “rotten elements”, and keep those who put the ANC first and not themselves. - Sapa