Cope a 'by-product' waiting to happen

History shows that the Congress of the People (Cope) was a ‘by-product” waiting to happen, African National Congress (ANC) president Jacob Zuma said on Tuesday.

At the ANC’s final press briefing before elections, held at the Rosebank Hotel in Johannesburg, Zuma explained that all former liberation movements reached a turning point.

‘Always, after 10 years, 15 years, towards 20 years, they reach a point where they’ve got to move forward or stand in one place or deteriorate,” he said. ‘I think the ANC was moving forward.”

However, there were individuals, he said, who ‘began to interpret the ANC differently, and wanted the ANC to be something else, and wanted the ANC to have a particular leadership”.

These individuals ‘fell by the wayside” because they could not succeed in swaying the ANC in a different direction.

‘And these are the pieces that collected themselves together to form Cope,” he concluded.

Zuma said he was ‘not very keen to comment” on his dropped corruption charges, saying there was no cloud of suspicion around him.

‘You are innocent until proven guilty,” he said. ‘That means there is no cloud, not even a mist.”

He also took a swipe at the media for ‘spinning” information.

‘You turn around information,” he said, ‘and you begin to believe it.”

He added that it was up to the media to foster a good relationship with him, and that they were not as powerful as they thought.

‘If the media was really capable of influencing people in this country, the situation would not be what it is,” he said, referring to the ANC’s popularity.

Zuma dismissed criticism of the ANC’s service delivery record, saying ‘there is no one faster than the ANC in South Africa on service delivery”. He refused to discuss the party’s finances because, he said, he is ‘not the treasury general”.

Lastly he dismissed sentiments that the Democratic Alliance-led Western Cape was the best run province in the country because ‘if that city had done well, they wouldn’t have the drug problem”.