The corruption accused former mayor will not be allowed to take office because of the ANC’s step-aside rule. Photo: Darren Stewart/Gallo Images
Supporters of corruption-charged ANC leaders facing the April 30 step-aside deadline are preparing to nominate them for regional and provincial leadership positions at the party’s pre-conference branch general meetings.
The push-back by backers of key ANC leaders from the so-called radical economic transformation faction — including former eThekwini chairperson Zandile Gumede — will begin in earnest at the branch general meetings this weekend.
It comes as the clock runs down on Gumede, secretary general Ace Magashule and other leaders affected by the stand-aside ruling, which was adopted by the ANC’s 54th national conference in 2017 and implemented by a series of meetings of the party’s national executive committee (NEC).
Last week the ANC KwaZulu-Natal leadership submitted a list of 13 leaders — most of them eThekwini municipality councillors facing corruption charges — who should step aside.
If the move to nominate Gumede and others fails, they will be effectively locked out of the regional and provincial ANC leadership contest at the conferences — and out of the party’s elective national conference, scheduled for the end of 2022.
Gumede is out on R50 000 bail after being arrested, along with a network of councillors, city officials and contractors, over an allegedly corrupt solid waste tender which cost the city about R400-million for services it never received.
eThekwini ANC councillor Ntando Khuzwayo, the spokesperson for the branches backing Gumede, said she would be nominated as chairperson at the next round of branch general meetings. Gumede will be up against Thabani Nyawose, the coordinator of president Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2017 election campaign in the region.
“She will definitely be nominated to stand as chairperson. There are no two ways about it,” said Khuzwayo. “Call me in a week’s time and you will get the statistics you want. The majority of the branches in the region want Mama to stand as chairperson of the region and they will nominate her.”
Khuzwayo said any attempt to prevent branches from nominating the candidates of their choice would not be accepted. “There hasn’t been any communication that she cannot be nominated. If there were, it would be an absurdity.”
Gumede was moved to the KwaZulu-Natal legislature after the ANC recalled her as eThekwini mayor in 2018 and collapsed the eThekwini party region. She is deputy coordinator of the regional task team running the ANC in eThekwini.
“Branches are going to start nominating from this week. We will see movement from today onwards,” Khuzwayo said on Wednesday.
He said branches would continue to nominate Gumede after the April 30 deadline for her to step aside.
“It doesn’t look as if that step-aside ruling will be applied now. It is going to take the ANC a very long time to refine it and come up with a proper ruling and implement it. It is not implementable in its present from,” Khuzwayo said.
Andile Lungisa, a convict and Magashule ally, has also thrown his hat in the ring as chairperson of the Nelson Mandela Bay region.
He will be going up against ANC MPL Babalwa Lobishe, who is a close ally of Oscar Mabuyane. She was brought in as a task team coordinator to clean up the ANC in the metro when the provincial executive committee disbanded it in 2018.
Lungisa enjoyed the support of branches in the region but some party leaders say this has shifted since he was convicted and served four months for assaulting a Democratic Alliance councillor.
Lungisa, a former ANC Youth League deputy chairperson, has ambitions of using Nelson Mandela Bay to propel the province against the Ramaphosa and Mabuyane faction.
He also has ambitions of taking a position in the NEC, but he has been weakened in the Eastern Cape and Magashule has thus been blocked from making a play in the province.
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