Health Minister Zweli Mkhize is under fire from the DA. Picture: Jacques Nelles
With preliminary results for the nomination of ANC presidential candidates indicating that President Cyril Ramaphosa is in the lead, his rival, former health minister, Zweli Mkhize, has spoken out against vote-buying.
Delivering the Oliver Tambo Memorial Lecture at the Pietermaritzburg City Hall on Saturday, Mkhize said the practice of vote-buying undermined the will of ANC branches.
It’s correct to regulate the use of money in internal campaigns of the ANC to ensure the will of the people is not overshadowed by cheque book politics in which the hard-working and honest servants of the people are defeated by the highest bidder to whom buying votes matters more than loyal service to the ordinary people of our land.
[We must] end the use of money and allow branches and delegates to express their will.
Mkhize, who hails from Pietermaritzburg’s Willowfontein township, delivered his Oliver Tambo Memorial Lecture amid speculation that eight of the ANC provinces have nominated Ramaphosa.
Reports that Ramaphosa has the support of the majority of ANC branches across the country, started doing the rounds on Saturday, a few hours after the ANC electoral commission chaired by former president, Kgalema Motlanthe, concluded the consolidation of nomination reports from the party’s nine provinces on Friday.
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Out of the ANC’s nine provinces, KwaZulu-Natal was the only province which endorsed Mkhize, with 89% of the province’s branches backing the former health minister.
Asked whether Mkhize’s statement on vote-buying could be interpreted as a way of his telling the public why ANC branches in the eight provinces endorsed Ramaphosa instead of him, ANC KZN provincial spokesperson, Mafika Mndebele, said projections that Mkhize has lost were “premature”.
We are still waiting for official results from the ANC electoral commission. However, even if the reports turn out to be true, it doesn’t mean that comrade Khabazela (Mkhize) has lost the conference. We still have a long way to go.
The branches which have been nominating candidates for the ANC national conferences have also nominated branch delegates who will vote on their behalf at the gathering which is scheduled to take place at Johannesburg’s Nasrec Expo from December 16 to December 20.
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It was not uncommon, Mndebele said, for the delegates to vote for candidates who were not nominated by their branches.
We saw this happening during the 2017 national conference where NDZ (Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma), who received more nominations from ANC branches, went on to lose at the actual conference.
As we speak, the work to lobby ANC branches across the country has begun.
As the ANC in KZN we remain confident that comrade Khabazela (Mkhize) will emerge at the conference.
According to the unofficial results, while Mkhize achieved the 20% threshold required for him to contest the president position at the conference, other presidential candidates including Dlamini-Zuma, deputy president David Mabuza and Tourism minister, Lindiwe Sisulu did not garner enough votes to meet the 20% threshold.
About 4 000 ANC delegates, the majority of whom are from the party’s branches, are eligible to vote at the conference.
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