OLD HANDS. ANC veterans who attended the recent ANC national conference from left: Mavuso Msimang, Snuki Zikalala, former president Thabo Mbeki, Prof Mongane 'Wally' Serote and Dr Fazel Randera. Picture: Brian Sokutu
While the current top seven ANC leadership is not a perfect team, it has the potential to pull South Africa back from the brink of a collapse in service delivery, economic stagnation and soaring crime levels, according to ANC veteran Mavuso Msimang.
Known for not mincing his words, Msimang who sat in the front row occupied by other party stalwarts, such as former president Thabo Mbeki, leader of the 1956 women’s march to the Union Buildings Sophia de Bruyn, Snuki Zikalala, Prof Mongane “Wally” Serote, Dr Fazel Randera and Mac Maharaj, did not have a good review of the ANC 55th national conference, blaming former president Jacob Zuma for having contributed to the chaos.
“The election of leaders who are in the ANC top seven will do a lot to pull the country from the brink.
“Although it is not a perfect team, perhaps the president has a team that he should be able to work better with than the people he had before,” said Msimang.
He described the watershed gathering as “a difficult conference, organisationally, with logistics absolutely not good”.
“I was particularly disappointment by the registration of delegates, which ought not to have inconvenienced everybody,” he said.
“While it got off to a good start, during the opening day we had an unfortunate incident in which a group from KwaZulu-Natal had decided that they wanted to collapse the national conference. Their timing seemed to have been carefully planned, with Zuma coming late – which is not really a good thing.
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“His coming late was met with the clapping of hands and doing all sorts of things, which continued on and on. The attempted disruption of the conference went on and it was absolutely nasty,” said Msimang.
Having attended several ANC national conferences in his life, Msimang said he had “never attended an ANC national conference, which was this bad”.
“Because of the determination of the vast majority of people in attendance at the conference, attempts at derailing the gathering did not work. People wanted this to work – and in the end, it worked,” he added.
Reflecting on intense lobbying for top leadership positions and for the national executive committee (NEC), Msimang said: “There was a lot of canvassing behind the scenes. I suppose these things are done behind the scenes – lobbying for particular people to be elected to the NEC and to the top seven.
“While people are entitled to do those things, unfortunately, it was not lobbying for people who would take the ANC forward and deal decisively with current issues.
“Nobody was talking about the high levels of unemployment, the soaring crime rate, Eskom blackouts and all the things that are plaguing the nation.
“It seems as if the main focus was to remove President Cyril Ramaphosa in what we saw as being a very opportunistic alliance of people who were previously in different groupings. The main thing was to stop Ramaphosa from winning the second term.”
– brians@citizen.co.za
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