The president of the ANC Veterans League Snuki Zikalala.
In a bid to intensify the party’s so-called renewal, the ANC Veterans’ League, backed by former president Thabo Mbeki, has called for those reapplying for membership or making new applications to be thoroughly vetted.
The vetting or audit would bar any person who has a criminal record and if the league gets its way, members would have to meet certain criteria before being allowed to stand for leadership roles in the party.
Veterans league president Snuki Zikalala told the Mail & Guardian on Monday that the vetting process needed to happen because the party was heavily infiltrated.
“If you join any company now, they’ll find out if you have a criminal record or not but [for] our membership system, there’s nothing like that and we are saying that must be included,” he said.
“We have to see when you were sentenced. They must be on probation and after that probation period, it’s then that you can be accepted.”
Zikalala said the ANC needed to amend its constitution for this to be included in the membership system. Asked whether this move would not affect those who are already party members, he said it did not matter. “Their membership finishes and then they have to renew it. Even if it’s not finished, for the renewal of it, you must say whether you have a criminal record or not.”
The veterans league has also called for the ANC’s step-aside rule to be amended for it to not only to affect those criminally charged but also those with allegations of impropriety hanging over them.
“There are true members of the ANC who had clouds over them. They were always in the papers and they said I’m stepping aside now for the sake of the organisation,” Zikalala said.
The ANC has struggled to rid itself of its image as an organisation riddled with corruption, for example some of its members implicated in awarding government tenders to friends, family or donors of the organisation without following proper procedure.
Other party members are facing criminal charges in matters involving the VBS Mutual Bank heist, state capture, mismanagement of Covid-19 funds, money laundering, murder and various other crimes.
In August 2020, President Cyril Ramaphosa wrote a letter to the party that said the ANC was now accused number one for corruption.
At the ANC Gauteng renewal workshop in Gauteng on Sunday, Mbeki said the party had identified the decline in the political quality of its members since the 1997 elective conference to the last one in 2022.
“[As] part of the renewal, you need a process to audit this membership in order to be able on the basis of certain criteria to be able to say, this one can stay on as a member and you go on probation. It arises from decisions that have been taken by the movement itself, about itself, over a number of decades,” Mbeki said.
Mbeki related how one ANC provincial chairperson had told him that 60% of the people with ANC membership in his area did not deserve to carry membership cards.
“He says there’s a region in the province where every single ANC branch in that region is led by a criminal. To make matters worse, he says in terms of the last provincial conference, the comrade who is the leader in that region is now a member of the provincial executive committee,” Mbeki said.
He added that the renewal process should not be done on a factional basis, but rather set criteria must be agreed on. Because the ANC was a people’s movement, the people who live where the party’s leaders do should be able to assess them.
“You might be surprised that the people know us better than we know ourselves,” the former president said.
Responding to media questions, ANC acting national spokesperson Zuko Godlimpi said the auditing of who becomes a member of the organisation was a proposal by the veterans league. He said the proposal did not end at auditing members, but also included a reading of how the party approaches its internal elections.
“You could be a member but does it stand to reason that you should automatically qualify for leadership just because you are a member,” Godlimpi said.
Because of the ANC’s hold on state power, he said, leadership had become an immediate vehicle for social and economic upward mobility.
“Therefore all manner of shady characters in all spaces would do all that they can to abuse membership of the ANC in order to get themselves into positions of economic extraction,” Godlimpi said.
“This challenge is not unique to the ANC. If you were to press all the organisations that are leading local government, you’ll find this thing. The entire democratic system is under pressure from unscrupulous elements.”