THE ANC NEC on Friday continued its back-pedalling on the Phala Phla affair, discussing the energy crisis instead of its Integrity Commission’s findings on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s conduct in the wake of the scandal.
Farmgate was bumped down the agenda, and the energy crisis dominated proceedings at the ANC’s National Executive Committee’s (NEC’s) special meeting.
Ramaphosa also delivered “political remarks” at Friday’s meeting, it emerged.
It was expected that the meeting would discuss the Integrity Commission’s report on Phala Phala. However, this was not the case.
ANC national spokesperson Pule Mabe confirmed that the meeting did not discuss the report. He said the report would now be delivered at the ANC’s 55th National Elective Conference by deputy president David Mabuza.
Mabe said ANC treasurer-general Paul Mashatile would deliver an overall address, head of policy Jeff Radebe would deal with different policy documents, and the coordinator in the office of the secretary general, Gwen Ramokgopa, would all be at Nasrec on Wednesday at a media networking session.
Mabe said the conference had to consider how the NEC should treat decisions and recommendations of the integrity commission; whether they would be binding or whether they could be referred to a subsequent structure.
He said they believed they had done everything necessary to make sure that on December 16 they started the national conference.
Mabe said the NEC received a report from Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan, and Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe on load shedding. He said the energy crisis undermined economic growth in South Africa,
This week Eskom implemented stage 6 load shedding and on Friday the power utility announced that it was reducing rolling blackouts to stage 5.
“We can confirm that the president delivered the political remarks as was expected,” Mabe said. “The deputy president did present the organisational report presentation, the treasurer-general did present the finance report.
“As we came back from lunch we received an update on some of the developments in the country, especially about the energy issue. We are sure South Africans are as concerned as we are in the ANC about the energy crisis. South Africans will want to know what is the position of the ruling party to permanently attend to all of this,” said Mabe.
He said the NEC received a briefing on what was happening and they would reflect on the challenges faced by Eskom and pronounce themselves on the decisive actions required by government so South Africans could see that the party was dealing with the issues of generation and energy security permanently.
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The Star