ANDISIWE MAKINANA
Political Bureau
RACIST rhetoric and speeches denouncing the media were the order of the day as the ANC celebrated its win in the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality.
Addressing an impromptu rally outside the Port Elizabeth city hall last night, the former mayor and ANC chairman in the region, Nceba Faku, said the ANC’s victory had been a victory against the media.
He declared: “The battle is between the ANC and the media. The primary battle in this democracy is against the media.”
Faku accused the Port Elizabeth-based newspaper, the EP Herald, of trying to destroy the party in the region.
“Burn Herald burn, passop(beware) Herald passop!” he chanted to a cheering crowd of between 300 and 400 ANC members.
“We dedicated our lives, sacrificed families for the sake of freedom. We have to draw the line; we must draw the line now, not later,” Faku said.
In a speech peppered with slogans deriding DA leader Helen Zille, Faku called on “white parties who use black people to go (in)to the sea, or go to Europe”.
He urged a return to the heyday of the United Democratic Front (UDF), saying: “We must mix democratic principles with protest principles. We’ll fight bullet with bullet.”
He then chanted: “We need Malema in town!”, a reference to the ANC Youth League leader who is also known for his racist rhetoric in the run-up to the elections, when he urged that whites be treated as criminals because they had stolen land from black people.
Senior ANC MP Cedric Frolick said the party’s victory in the metro was a victory against racism and against an agenda pushed by the DA and the media.
People who voted for the DA would need to be “rescued” as they had gone back to (wearing) shackles, he said.
While also taking a swipe at the media, ANC regional secretary Zandisile Qupe warned the party’s newly elected councillors that they would have to deliver on promises made, or the ANC would lose the next elections in 2014.
“Our message to you is: our people must not be fooled. They must not be taken for granted.”
Qupe admitted that the ANC had pulled through “despite our own differences, organisational, political and service delivery challenges, our people went out to vote the ANC”.
The ANC won 34 of the metro’s 60 wards, losing nine with mainly coloured voters in northern Port Elizabeth. The party also lost several coloured wards in Uitenhage.