Howard Barrell The crisis in the United Democratic Movement deepened this week as leaders of its two warring factions drew up battle lines and party president Bantu Holomisa prepared to visit its Eastern Cape stronghold to explain the suspension of the province’s leadership. Prime movers in the two factions – a “populist” faction headed by UDM secretary general Malizole Diko and the “non- racialists” around Eastern Cape party leader Chief Gladstone Dumisane Qwadiso – have spent the week marshalling support among MPs and the middle levels of the party. A UDM disciplinary committee cleared Qwadiso and his supporters of any wrongdoing during elections at the Eastern Cape congress of the party in May this year. But at a meeting in Benoni last weekend, the party’s national management committee, which is dominated by Diko supporters, decided to suspend the UDM’s Eastern Cape management committee. Holomisa, Diko and UDM national chair Masilo Mabeta were preparing this week for a meeting in King William’s Town on Saturday where they were due to explain to the party’s Eastern Cape structures why they had been disbanded. “It could be a very difficult meeting for Bantu – if Diko doesn’t manage to manipulate something,” one of Qwadiso’s lieutenants said this week. Remarkably, the national management committee meeting that suspended the Eastern Cape leadership was not attended by representatives of UDM structures in the Free State and Gauteng – two provinces tending, with the Western Cape, towards Qwadiso. The Qwadiso faction says court action is also likely in its battle to have the Eastern Cape leadership reinstated. Qwadiso supporters charge Diko is ruthlessly trying to consolidate his position as Holomisa’s heir. They say Diko managed to get elected secretary general at a UDM national council meeting in Bloemfontein in July because of the voting system that applied. Each province had the same number of votes, irrespective of the number of party branches within it. They believe Diko fears a backlash at the UDM’s national congress next year where each province’s representation will be weighted to reflect membership numbers. Hundreds of Eastern Cape branches should have more than half the votes there. “So Diko seems to have decided that he must disband the Eastern Cape structure and force it to swear allegiance to him,” said a Qwadiso supporter. If the provincial structure can’t protect them, branches know the secretary general can keep them out of national and provincial congresses.” The “populist” faction are claiming Holomisa, while Qwadiso’s supporters are bewildered at the UDM president’s failure so far to intervene in a power struggle that threatens to tear the party apart on the eve of local government elections in which it will be hard-pressed to match its showing in the general election last year. Party sources suggest the explanation may lie back in the murky world of pre-1994 Transkei homeland politics. Holomisa became military leader of the territory in the late 1980s. Two of the leading lights in the Diko faction, who are also now members of the Eastern Cape provincial legislature – Zukele Luenge and Zolwane Sobuwa – are understood also to have been prominent in the former homeland’s forces of law and order: Luenge in the department of correctional services and Sobuwa in both correctional services and the Transkei defence force.