ANC puts foot down, says no sore losers will be tolerated at elective conference

The ANC will not tolerate sore losers at the upcoming national elective conference. A task team will engage all the candidates to persuade them not to challenge the outcome, the party says.

ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe said yesterday the organisation was not anticipating disruptions, post-conference electoral result disputes or breakaways from the party.

This is after a source told The Citizen that Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s camp planned to disrupt and collapse the conference if she lost, while the Ramaphosa side planned a breakaway if he was defeated.

Mantashe said the presidential candidates were expected to be prepared to win or lose in the party elections. And all candidates must accept the outcome and pledge their support for the winner.

Regarding the question of unity and the rumours of so-called “leadership by arrangement”, Mantashe said if the delegates agreed to an uncontested leadership, the decision would not be rejected. But he denied that there was a “leadership by arrangement” agreement, saying it would be a democratic process if it came from the floor of the conference.

“If there must be no contest, we will agree. If the delegates agree, we cannot call it arranged leadership, it’s an engagement. There is nothing wrong with that, politically,” he said.

Presently the ruling party, which holds its national elective conference at Expo Centre south of Johannesburg from December 16 to 20, is dealing with numerous disputes emanating from its branch general meetings (BGMs).

The BGMs were so rumbustious that the Free State has to rerun its BGMs after a high court ruling in Bloemfontein nullified previous branch meetings on the basis that they were flawed. Mantashe said some of the branch meetings were dispute-prone, but the ANC was not anticipating the results of the leadership elections to be challenged.

“The conference will be stable and anyone who misbehaves will be dealt with by his own provincial leadership. “If you are an anarchist, you must be dealt with by your province. If not, we will take you out of the conference.”

Mantashe said the ANC did not approve of the decision to vote for “unity” at the ANC conference, as happened in Mpumalanga recently.

“There will be no vote for unity because there is nobody called unity. There will be no unity on the ballot box,” Mantashe said.

The Free State ANC would be represented at the conference despite a court ruling that it must rerun its branch general meetings.

– ericn@citizen.co.za

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