The African National Congress (ANC) has to maintain its links with the people on the ground, ANC chairperson Baleka Mbete said on Thursday.
“I think some things very clearly relate to how we must tighten up our … link to the ground,” she said at the National Union of Mineworkers central committee meeting in Boksburg.
Mbete told delegates that after the local government elections, the ANC had analysed the results to determine what messages communities were sending to the party.
“We really thought we need to listen very carefully to what our people are saying,” she said. “We need mechanisms to keep us in touch.”
She said it was “not nice” to go to people ahead of elections and hear them say: “We last saw you just before the last election.”
“The door-to-door campaign must not be reserved only for the last three months before the election,” she said.
“It’s very important to us … to always be kept sober about the reality on the ground.”
She said the party had to conduct door-to-door visits on an ongoing basis.
Hard work ahead
The problems ANC members faced with the list process ahead of the polls was also being tackled.
A task team was already at work trying to resolve those problems, she said.
Mbete said the elections were over, but a lot of hard work lay ahead.
“We want to understand how we lost some of the communities that have always been our strongholds,” she said, citing Riverlea as an example.
She told delegates that independent research commissioned by the party into the results showed that the ANC had, in some ways, performed better than “what we hear in the public media”.
Congress of South African Trade Unions general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi was expected to address delegates later on Thursday. — Sapa