Cape Town - Thousands of ANC delegates are heading to the party’s 55th elective conference to be held at Nasrec Expo Centre in Johannesburg, which starts Friday and ends on Tuesday.
The conference comes as the organisation is deeply divided as factions fight for the soul of the ANC. It also takes place as the party is being hauled to court over the nomination of candidates to the national executive committee (NEC) and some leaders being disqualified from standing for election.
On Wednesday, senior party official Dakota Lekgoete said they were ready to hold the national elective conference after branches held more than 4 200 branch general meetings and nominated their preferred candidates.
Lekgoete said accommodation and transportation had been organised for the delegates, who started arriving on Wednesday.
“We expect all things to run smoothly,” he told the public broadcaster.
The ANC is expecting more than 4 200 delegates, with KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Eastern Cape sending the most delegations.
The Western Cape has 297 delegates, with at least 85 from the Dullar Omar region.
ANC treasurer-general Paul Mashatile recently said the plan was for the conference to start with a presidential gala dinner to be addressed by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Thursday, as part of fundraising efforts.
The actual conference starts on Friday.
“Once the president has delivered the political report, the Deputy President will deliver the organisational report and I will do the treasury report,” he said.
The ANC plans to elect the top-six positions late on Friday if there are no delays, and discussions in the commissions will take place on Saturday.
On Wednesday, the Elections Committee, headed by former president Kgalema Motlanthe, reversed its earlier decision to bar Tony Yengeni from contesting, citing a “serious crime in a court of law for which the prison sentence had been more than six months”.
This was in reference to the corruption case dating back to when he was the party’s chief whip more than 20 years ago and had served time in prison.
Yengeni said he felt good about the success of his appeal after he submitted the expunging of his criminal record, and he felt the disbarring was unjust, unwarranted and was done in haste.
He said his criminal case and subsequently disciplinary hearing were widely published.
“If their vetting process needed to know some of these things, they could easily have given me a call and I would have answered. This drama, in my view, was not only unfair but unwarranted,” Yengeni said.
The Elections Committee dismissed an appeal by former ANC Women’s League president Bathabile Dlamini, who was barred on similar grounds, despite paying a fine.
It told Dlamini that it would make proposals to the conference regarding amendments to the rules.
“The Electoral Committee will notify you should the decision of the 55th national conference regarding the proposed amendments have any impact on your disqualification.”
Dlamini took it to Twitter to express herself on the matter, saying “this is personal, it is testing power”.
“It’s only the constitution that is amended at conference. How do you take something that was not discussed by branches to a conference for amendments? This is confusion,” Dlamini said.
Yengeni said the rules should be discussed and that they should not be applicable in the conference.
“They are to put this conference in big trouble,” he said.
Commenting on Yengeni’s appeal, committee secretary Livhuwani Matsila said the decision showed that they were a fair and transparent structure of the ANC.
“Once it makes its decision, those decisions can be appealed internally using internal remedy,” Matsila said, adding that Yengeni was free now to contest for positions.
However, he said they had made sure that they applied the rules objectively.
“The rules are in the best interest of the organisation in terms of image in society,” Matsila said.
Today, the Integrity Committee is to argue in court an application brought by disgruntled ANC members, calling themselves the Kgalema disputed NEC list, who demand to be furnished with raw data used for the consolidation of NEC additional members’ nomination.
The group, who claim due processes were not followed, want the matter to be part of the conference agenda.
Matsila said the recourse sought by the members had already been fulfilled as they were furnished with the lists and raw data.
“We don’t understand why they still want to continue with the court case,” he said.
Political analyst Levy Ndou said inability of the ANC to manage succession has brought deep divisions within the party since the Polokwane conference in 2007 .
“The ANC is quite unable to bring all factions together and bring one united ANC,” Ndou said.
He also said the delegates should make sure that after the conference they had a product of a united ANC.
“If there is continuation of factions, the ANC has a possibility to be divided again,” Ndou added.
Cape Times