The ANC dissident has invited two disaffected politicians to join him in discussions about a new political party, reports Marion Edmunds
AFRICAN National Congress dissident Bantu Holomisa is inviting both Rockey Malabane- Metsing and former Bophuthatswana president Lucas Mangope, to his consultative conference in June in anticipation of setting up a new political party.
Holomisa told the Mail & Guardian that Malabane-Metsing sent a three-person delegation to his office in the centre of Johannesburg last week to discuss the new party.
“I told them that at this moment we are unable to talk about alliances. The issue of whether alliances are an advantage or a disadvantage will be debated at the June conference. I invited them to come on board,” he said.
Holomisa said he knew Malabane-Metsing from his days at Shell House, and that he had asked the delegation to set up a face-to- face meeting with him.
Malabane-Metsing is a man with an axe to grind. After leading the ANC in the North- West before the elections, he was defeated by Popo Molefe in the race for provincial premier, and subsequently dismissed from government in November 994 for allegedly not adhering to a policy of reconciliation. He performed poorly in the 1995 local government elections. Recently he has claimed, in an affidavit, that he may be the target of an assassination plot by unidentified ANC members.
Mangope, once Malabane-Metsing’s arch enemy, kept a low profile after he was ousted as president of Bophuthatswana, but recently has returned to the public eye – largely because he is facing 208 charges of fraud for misappropriating millions of rands while he was in power.
He is also to give evidence next week before the Tebbutt commission into the 1994 Bophuthatswana uprising. He is also suing Water Affairs Minister Kader Asmal for calling him a baboon. Sources in the North- West say that his followers lately have been encouraging the singing of the old Bophuthatswana national anthem, a song regarded as unpatriotic by Molefe’s administration.
Both Malabane-Metsing and Mangope have a small following among disgruntled public servants – a number of whom are increasingly disillusioned by the ANC government. Holomisa knows this constituency well, and speaks directly to them.
As he said this week: ” The problem is a lack of governance in all provinces run by the ANC. It’s a problem they have at a national level and it is expressed in their difficulty to implement policy. What is also coming up is that political nepotism is affecting productivity in the civil service, especially the appointment of unqualified people which is shaking the entire civil service to its fibre.
“In Mmbatho so many civil servants who are trained, experienced and not corrupt are facing retrenchment, while ANC cadres get the jobs. People are complaining.”
Meanwhile, Holomisa is campaigning around the country, in advance of his June consultative conference. He is to address rallies at the University of the Western Cape this weekend, the Eastern Cape next weekend, and KwaZulu-Natal the week after that. In fact, he will be addressing rallies every Sunday until June.
He has also started to speak the language of opposition parties -rhetoric usually heard from the National Party and the Democratic Party. In a briefing note for funders, Holomisa says: “It is expected that South Africa should not repeat the same mistakes of African countries after they received independence … Most of these governments were democratically elected, however, they hid under the cloak of democracy, yet practising dictatorship. One of their tendencies has been to crush the opposition and the media thus leading to a one-party state.”