Eastern Cape ANC provincial chairman and premier Makhenkesi Stofile on Friday called for unity in the party warning against those who created artificial divisions out of ”mischief and self interest”.
Presenting his political report to the provincial conference Umtata, he said the African National Congress (ANC) would only be able to achieve the tasks it had set itself ”if we close our ranks as never before”.
Unity in action ”means the very survival of the ANC and our revolution”, he added.
”We cannot afford artificial divisions that mask personal and selfish ambitions. We have to give leadership to our members and to the rest of society.”
The provincial conference is a re-run of last year’s gathering. The ANC nullified the results of leadership elections at the last conference amid allegations of voting irregularities.
He was speaking on Friday ahead of a crucial new vote for leadership positions in the party in the province.
Stofile also criticised the opposition United Democratic Movement (UDM) saying that it did not constitute and ”ideological challenge” and was an organisation ”born out of careerism and political expediency.
”History is already correcting that disturbance in the programme of liberation as it did to many others before it.”
Turning to the Interim Management Team (IMT) dispatched by President Thabo Mbeki to address capacity problems in the Eastern Cape government, he said this had been done at his request adding that most of the provinces senior managers were taken by national departments and parastatals.
”We train them and you steal them. We train them well and then they are stolen by the public and private sector and that pulls us down.”
Turning to the ANC’s working arrangement with the NNP, Stofile said it was important to note that the ANC’s struggle had never been ”against the National Party per se let alone against white people” but against the philosophy of governing a country in a manner that excluded the majority of its citizens.
He said those battles were now over and ”we have no choice but to stand together and build our country and our province into a non-racial community”.
Stofile said it was ”common knowledge” that neither the ANC nor NNP had been able to break into areas of non-traditional support and this was to be expected given 300 years of segregation.
He said history now demanded that the present generation should ”correct what our forefathers did, so that our children and grandchildren will truly live what has been an elusive dream: freedom, equality, opportunity, justice and peace”. – Sapa