Duarte slams Zuma’s detractors, suggests the ANC ‘made them’

ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte slated President Jacob Zuma’s detractors during an interview on Sunday night with Gupta-owned news channel ANN7.

According to a TimesLIVE report, Duarte said burgeoning anti-Zuma campaigns calling for the president to resign from office following his controversial Cabinet reshuffle were misguided.

She suggested that some of the governing party’s biggest critics were who they were today because of the ANC.

“Strangely enough‚ to me‚ and it might just be coincidental‚ that it is people who own big shares in mining companies who are the most vociferous.

“These are people whom the ANC had given many opportunities to as ambassadors and so on‚ and I think that a more measured approach is required … instead of an approach that gives an ultimatum, and that ultimatum is: this is our ANC, and Jacob Zuma must go …

“I don’t think Cheryl Carolus [former ANC deputy secretary-general] and Sipho [Pityana] and Dr [Fazel] Randera and people like that have calculated the kind of reaction that is going to come to an ultimatum of that sort about the president of the ANC‚ whom our constitution says must also be the president of the country,” Duarte was quoted as saying.

Carolus and Randera are part of a group of 101 ANC struggle veterans and stalwarts who have raised concerns about the direction the party has taken under Zuma’s leadership.

Sipho Pityana – a well-known Zuma critic and chairperson of AngloGold Ashanti – is the convener of the Save South Africa coalition, which has been organising a number of marches and townhall meetings across the country calling for Zuma to step down from office.

Duarte added the ANC had always welcomed its critics to an open discussion based on mutual respect, and the party had never turned anyone away, including Pityana, who she said once held a meeting with ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe at the party’s Luthuli House headquarters in Johannesburg.

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