Johannesburg - With the ANC's elective conference just over a week away, branches which lodged disputes have been given until Saturday to re-run their branch general meetings (BGM) in order to qualify to participate at the conference.
This was revealed by the governing party's secretary-general Gwede Mantashe at a post-national executive committee briefing held at the ANC's Luthuli House headquarters in Joburg on Monday.
Mantashe also confirmed that the ANC Free State's provincial executive committee (PEC) will be participating in next week's elective conference to be held in Nasrec, Joburg, as the PEC is still a structure of the ANC.
This is despite a court challenge last week lodged in the Free State, which scuppered the province's elective conference that was to be held from Friday.
A Free State court ordered the re-running of 29 BGMs, which were deemed to have been irregularly constituted.
The ANC Free State's PEC term ended in May, but Mantashe maintained that it had not been dissolved.
"It (PEC's) are not like medicine where there is an expiry date. There's no such thing as a structure collapsing because of a sell-by-date," Mantashe asserted.
He added that the 29 Free State BGM would be re-run fro Wednesday.
Mantashe would not be drawn into revealing how many branches had lodged disputes with his office over irregularly constituted BGMs, saying only that the disputes had been "processed and resolved".
The secretary-general said ANC President Jacob Zuma gave a political report at the party's NEC meeting on Sunday, where Zuma referred to himself as the "outgoing ANC president", and gave a "warm and fatherly overview" on the state of the organisation.
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