ANC MP Makhosi Khoza – who left the ruling party on Thursday – took to social media shortly after the announcement to explain her reasons for the move.
“I sacrificed my childhood, and my teenage years, without second thought, as a response to my deeply held conviction for the vision, values and virtue of this organisation.”
She said the party she had joined was “valued freedom of speech, and open dissemination of ideas and truth”.
“It is one that sought to rescue ALL Africans trapped in the grips of poverty, unemployment, destitution and hopelessness.”
She called the ANC “an alien that trampled on the sacrifices of innumerable years in prison, banishment, exile and separation from families”.
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She said she had been told in the past that the ANC just needed to “self-correct”.
She asked: “What level of impetus is needed to catalyze such change? At the municipal elections the ANC lost the City of Cape Town, which houses the legislative arm of government, did it self correct?”
She also discussed the country’s unemployment rates and poor academic performance rankings internationally.
“(People) of South Africa, this self-correction is not coming. This ANC will not self-correct because the politics of patronage run deeper than roots to the core of the earth.”
Khoza called for South Africa to be exemplary on the African continent “by jailing all corrupt leaders”.
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She said: “As I embark on this very difficult journey, and continue to speak truth to power, I know the road ahead is going to be torturous.”
In conclusion, she quoted Anton Lembede, the first ANC Youth League President, who said the following in 1945 at age 31: “We need young men and women of high moral stamina and integrity; of courage and vision. This means we have to develop a type of youth – not pleasure loving, frivolous, dissolute, light minded type – but youth of stoical discipline, trained to endure suffering and difficulties. It is only this type of youth that will achieve national liberation of the African people.”
Khoza said: “So it is now, with a heavy heart, that I have to say, that this is no longer the ANC that I know.”
Read her full statement
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