Johannesburg - Former ANC national chairperson Baleka Mbete has urged the governing party to hold a national cleansing ceremony to help it deal with the troubles it’s currently facing.
The former National Assembly speaker, who was recently appointed to be the convener of the ANC Women’s League task team after its leadership structure was disbanded in April, believes the party needs cleansing.
Mbete, who also became the country’s deputy president after former president Thabo Mbeki was recalled by the ANC in 2008, said the cleansing campaign must be multi-sectoral and be from local to national levels.
”It must be thoroughgoing in touching every ANC branch in the application of not the usual groups that were created on factional lines, but gatherings of healing through opening every chest and freeing ourselves of accumulated anger, tension, suspicions, mistrust, grudges, jealousies and hatred,” she writes in the latest edition of ANC Today, the party’s weekly newsletter.
According to Mbete, the idea for the national cleansing ceremony came in 2015 after she met a Shembe Church elder, who she described as “a particular messenger on this subject of cleansing”.
She said the old man from the Shembe church made references to ancient traditions and rituals and focused his attention on the agitation in the spirit world of souls that left abnormally from earth.
”Soon thereafter, I got visits by spirits of two such recently-departed well-known comrades confirming the old man’s message. This is the result of decades and even centuries of neglect of cleansing rituals and ceremonies at various levels. The key take out is: There’s a need for a National Cleansing Ceremony,” Mbete explained.
She added that as the ANC approached its national conference in December, it should prioritise considerations of what is in the national interest and the organisation, which she said is the vehicle to a better future for the country.
”We should be conscious that this vehicle was handed down to us by the founders who are watching over us.
I believe that they are troubled and determined to steer us away from any disaster. To truly follow through on the Mophaso ceremony (held to appease the ancestors), it is necessary to disrupt the ‘business as usual’ business of our lobby groups,” said Mbete.
Earlier in January this year, ANC treasurer-general Paul Mashatile invited Mbete to lead a team for the traditional Mophaso ceremony at the party’s 110th-anniversary celebrations in Limpopo in order for it to connect with its founding fathers’ spirits.
”I believe that the spirit world exists and is poised through collaborations with us to be enabled to help us get unstuck from the spiritual mud we are in. To take this in at a deeper level, we need a calmness of our individual spirits, an absence of ego-based considerations, and humility to accept that we do not possess full understanding and full knowledge of the potency of our heritage,“ she stated.
Mbete continued: “It is time to be immersed in the silences we need; it is time for us to listen to responses to the January 8 Mophaso ceremony. We must change!”
The new culture of unbridled factionalism was the source of all the ANC’s troubles, according to Mbete.
”The founding values and culture of servant leadership must be infused back into how we do things. We have to reflect deeply on how we address organisational and societal concerns on factionalism and corruption that feeds on it,” she said.