Delegates attending the African National Congress’ 51st conference in Stellenbosch will meet behind closed doors on Thursday to adopt a range of constitutional amendments, resolutions and a programme of action for the next five years.
The five-day conference ends on Friday.
Among the constitutional amendments is one on party discipline described by a Sunday newspaper as an attempt “to turn the screws on the ANC’s leftwing critics”.
This claim was rejected by the ANC in its online publication ANC Today.
“The amendments are consistent with the organisational discipline required of people who voluntarily join a movement like the ANC,” the ANC said.
Delegates began voting on Wednesday for the party’s 60-member national executive committee and the results are to be made public on Friday morning.
The conference also adopted an update to the ANC’s 1997 strategy and tactics document. Among the issues were where the ANC fitted ideologically “between the extremes of new-liberalism and modern ultra-leftism”.
“On the one extreme is the ideology of rampant capitalism, a system in which … form democracy should be underpinned by market forces to which all should kneel in the prayer: ‘everyone for himself and the Devil takes the hindmost!’.
“That is the core of the ideology of neo-liberalism and other such worldviews, which dare the democratic state to emasculate itself.”
ANC president Thabo Mbeki had accused the DA of being the most “unashamed proponent of neo-liberalism”.
“In reality this historical relic, which perpetuates itself by encouraging fear of democracy among the national minorities will not succeed,” he told the conference in his opening speech on Monday.
The strategy and tactics document refers to the other extreme as “ultra-left practices”
“A common feature of ultra-leftism is subjectivism — a confusion of what is desirable with what is actually and immediately possible.”
The ANC rejects both approaches, the document says. Joel Netshitenzhe, a member of the strategy and tactics commisison, told reporters on Wednesday that the ANC was a national liberation movement and was “not fighting for socialism”.
The ANC was in favour of a democratic society with a culture of human rights.
“In that regard the ANC does not believe in any of these ‘isms’,” he said.
The ANC came close to being a social democratic party, Netshitenzhe said.
But after three days of fine-tuning the future of their party and its policy, the conference tuned in to a different key on Wednesday night.
Instead of debating and deliberating, they were treated to a cultural evening during which some of the party’s top women swopped politics for poetry and strategy for singing.
The ANC trio — Home Affairs Deputy Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly Baleka Kgositsile-Mbete and diplomat Thuthu Skweyiya, the wife of Social Development Minister Zola Skweyiya — took to the microphone twice. The first time there were fewer than 100 people in the hall of the Paul Roos Gimnasium in Stellenbosch, where the party’s five-day national conference, attended by over 4 000 people, is being held. And that included the security guards of Deputy President Jacob Zuma.
As the plenary in the nearby DF Malan Memorial Centre finally came to an end, more delegates filed into the hall, and the trio repeated their repertoire of two songs about the birth of the ANC and about unsung woman heroes.
“We are going to repeat the same songs we sang earlier when there were still five people in the hall,” remarked.
Mapisa-Nqakula before the three songbirds gave it another go. After days of wrangling to get the wording in party documents just right, the emotions flowed freely in poetry written and read by Kgositsile Mbete, ANC national executive member Lindiwe Mabuza and Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele, who is to relinquish her job as Housing Minister as she has been elected as deputy secretary-general of the ANC on Monday.
The dominating theme was the pain and suffering of those involved in the struggle.
Veteran Gertrude Shope launched the book Malibongwe, a compilation of short histories of women who played a role in the years of fighting on different fronts for liberation.
These included women who lost their lives, or who lost relatives and still did not turn their backs on the revolution, she said. Zuma, who always participates eagerly in the singing and dancing at gatherings like the conference was worried that his voice might abandon him.
But it held, for him to pay tribute to women for their role in the struggle.
“During the time of the defiance campaign, they defied. They went to jail. They acted as volunteers. They were part of every facet of our struggle,” Zuma said.
“When the ANC decided to change the form of the struggle from a non-violent to a violent one and establish underground structures, they were there.
“When the time came for the apartheid regime to arrest, torture and murder, they were arrested, tortured and murdered,” he said.
Zuma said there was nothing of the struggle that women did not experience.
“It was they who remained with the children when the fathers were in prison. It was they who closed the eyes of their husbands and sons when they were murdered, and who mourned…
“And when the time came to negotiate, they negotiated.”
Zuma said there were still a number of stories to be told, and it would be a crime not to record those.
“At times people believe that freedom came walking or that somebody decided to bring freedom. They easily forget that some women and men sacrificed their lives for us to be free.” –