Suspended United Democratic Movement deputy president Malizole Diko plans to form a new party, according to affidavits filed this week in the Cape High Court.
The documents are part of the UDM’s bundle of papers in reply to a bid by Diko and five other party officials for an interdict lifting their suspension from the party, and preventing it from expelling them.
The application is to be argued on August 29, only three days before the opening of a floor-crossing window for national and provincial legislatures.
Their suspension on August 5, on suspicion that they intended to jump ship, was to have been followed by a disciplinary inquiry.
In one affidavit, UDM Free State provincial executive member Isaac Mokgatla says he phoned Diko on August 13 ”to get clarity” on the court action.
”It is then that Mr Diko told me that I don’t had to panic because weather they lose of win the court case on the 29th August 2005 they (Mr Diko and other six suspended MPs and MPLs) are going to form/establish a new political party [all sic].
”[H]e indicate[d] that they will get funding from IEC [the Independent Electoral Commission] and he further told me that the fact that they are having MPLs on their side means they will have many provincial offices compared to the UDM.
”He told me that they are still busy with arrangements and he will inform me when final arrangements have been made.”
Mokgatla says he was shocked by Diko’s comments, and immediately told UDM president Bantu Holomisa about the conversation.
In another affidavit, the secretary of the UDM’s OR Tambo region in the Transkei, Wandile Tsipa, says Diko told party members at a clandestine meeting in Mthatha on August 3 about the planned formation of a ”Patricia de Lille”-style party during the floor-crossing period.
”In the said meeting, he is alleged to have said that there are members from the ID [De Lille’s Independent Democrats], the ANC [African National Congress], the IFP [Inkatha Freedom Party] and the UDM who will be willing to join the new party as consultations have been going on.”
Diko has denied that he wants to defect to the ANC, saying it is an insult to accuse him of wanting to do so.
But in the court papers Holomisa says the conduct of Diko and the others ”flies in the face of their denial that they intend crossing the floor to the ANC, or any other political party”.
”I invite Diko to take this court into his confidence by revealing details of the lucrative positions he has been offered by the ANC, and who [on] behalf of the ANC made those offers and when.”
Diko said on Wednesday that the issue of joining or forming another party has nothing to do with the administrative justice he and his colleagues are seeking over their suspension.
However, he has been holding meetings with UDM members to brief them on what has been happening, and to get direction from them on what should be done in days to come, he said.
”At this stage, there are a number of proposals they have put on the cards.”
These include joining the ANC or another party, forming a new party or continuing within the UDM.
”At this stage, I haven’t really applied my mind on the various options they have put,” he said. ”At this stage I am fighting the court case.”
He will not rule out any of these options ”until one has applied one’s mind with the structures and with colleagues”.
The UDM court papers also show that the suspensions followed an earlier suggestion, agreed to by the party’s national executive, that a group of party members — including Diko — suspected of wanting to defect should resign their seats before the floor-crossing window, under a written guarantee that they would be reinstated after it had expired.
The other five suspended members involved in the High Court action are Diko’s fellow MP Nomakhaya Mdaka, and four MPLs, one each from the Western and Eastern Cape, Gauteng and Limpopo.
The UDM lost nine MPs and MPLs to the ANC during the previous national and provincial floor-crossing window in 2003. — Sapa