A long-awaited report into an incident where President Thabo Mbeki was heckled, allegedly by Jacob Zuma supporters, at last year’s reburial of former African National Congress (ANC) stalwart Moses Mabhida has been sent to the party’s secretary general, Kgalema Motlanthe.
The ANC’s KwaZulu-Natal secretary general, Senzo Mchunu, said he will not be divulging the contents of the report compiled by a task team to investigate the incident.
On December 2 last year, hundreds of mourners at the service at Pietermaritzburg’s Harry Gwala Stadium walked out when Mbeki began speaking — but not before they had blown vuvuzelas and heckled him, leaving Zuma desperately trying to calm the situation.
The ANC set up a task team, which included members of the tripartite alliance — the ANC, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party (SACP) — to investigate the incident.
Mchunu said the KwaZulu-Natal leadership of the ANC has accepted the report. ”We welcome the report. It is a human product and it can’t be perfect.”
ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama said he was not aware that the report had reached Motlanthe and could therefore not comment.
Earlier in January, Zuma chastised the media for labelling those who disrupted Mabhida’s reburial as Zuma supporters. He said they were ANC members whom he had ordered to stop heckling Mbeki.
Mabhida, a former secretary general of the SACP, died while in exile in Maputo in 1986. — Sapa