Chris Louw
TENSION is running high at the ANC’s Shell House headquarters as the final date for the organisation’s internal restructuring approaches. Hundreds of ANC employees expecting to lose their jobs are insisting on being re-employed in the civil service.
An internal memorandum detailing their fears and frustrations was this week leaked to the Mail & Guardian. It provides the first proof of unhappiness in ANC headquarters over the scaling-down of the organisation.
The memorandum, which served as the basis for a staff meeting with President Nelson Mandela last month, accuses ANC leadership of lacking vision. However, Shell House sources indicated that since the ANC inter-regional summit two weeks ago, some confidence in the leadership had been restored.
The memorandum’s poignant final paragraph says staff wish new ANC ministers and MPs “well, even though the majority never came back to say good-bye to their former staff members who battled on their side through all, thick and thin.
The internal re-ordering of the ANC will come into effect on October 1. Staff numbers are expected to be reduced from 1 200 to less than 100, although some have already been allocated jobs within a re- organised ANC.
The mood in Shell House has been restive ever since ANC secretary general Cyril Ramaphosa announced in June that the ANC’s 14 regions would be reduced to nine and internal departments to six.
ANC employees were promised jobs in the civil service. They now complain, however, that staff members’ absorption into the civil service is “in the hands of the old regime’s appointees and we do not see the ANC intervening effectively in this situation”.
The memorandum says the ANC “has guaranteed jobs for employees of the old order while it cannot do the same with its own people who really put them where they are”.
The leadership is accused of not having any “coherent policy/strategy/plan to integrate qualified ANC personnel” into the civil service.
At the meeting Mandela is understood to have promised disgruntled staff members that their concerns would receive attention.
Concerns raised by staff include:
* “Some of the things done by our leadership have ripple effects in other spheres of life — white farmers are retrenching their employees who are now littering many roads and justify their deeds by quoting rentrenchment in the ANC head office.”
* “The face of the ANC is changing at a very rapid pace. This is being seen by the growing intake of non-black people into the commanding heights in the ANC. For example, the ANC diplomatic corps all through the years was mostly African and now the ANC is in power but we still have the same old corps of the former regime. “
The ANC’s new spokesman, Jackson Mtembu, refused to comment on the allegations.