Organisers are seeking to limit the number of people attending Mosiuoa Lekota’s national convention this weekend to 4 000, but indications on Thursday were that they will be pressed to accommodate even more.
Hundreds of delegates from the Western Cape were scheduled to leave Cape Town in a convoy of buses on Thursday night.
Organiser Clifford Sitonga said the province had only been allocated 500 seats at the convention ”but as I speak to you now I am grappling with people that exceed that number”.
An extra bus had been added on Thursday to the nine already chartered, to accommodate a group of backyard dwellers from Gugulethu on the Cape Flats who insisted on going.
This brought the total to 560, he said. ”But there’s still more demand”.
From the Eastern Cape, former deputy defence minister Mluleki George said shortly before 6pm that five buses of delegates had already left, and two would follow from the Transkei and Pondoland.
A senior figure in the convention, Mbulelo Ncedana, said the Eastern and Western Cape, Free State, North West and Northern Cape had each been allocated 500 delegates; Mpumalanga, Gauteng and Limpopo 300 each; and KwaZulu-Natal, the heartland of ANC president Jacob Zuma, 200.
The rest of the 4 000 would be attendees such as himself and Lekota, who were not part of provincial delegations, as well as people from various organisations.
From the Northern Cape, the country’s most sparsely populated province, coordinator Mabena Ntwane said there would be a delegation drawn from ”various civil society structures”.
Youth leaders from the province would be armed with a written submission calling for the formation of a new political party.
Among the delegation would be the secretary of the ANC’s Frances Baard (Kimberley) region, Samora Ka-Komazi.
Preparations begin
Consultant Eddie Bannerman said from the Sandton Convention Centre, where the convention is to be held, that they were catering for 4 500 people, all of whom would have to be accredited off-site.
By 2pm on Thursday over 200 local and international journalists had applied for media accreditation, he said.
He said preparation at the venue, a massive hall, would begin in earnest on Friday morning, and would include cabling for live television feeds, and the erection of banners bearing the slogan: ”South African National Convention: In Defence of Democracy.”
Despite time pressures, Bannerman said he expected it to be a very sophisticated event.
‘We’re working around the clock, and we have been doing so for the past nine days,” he said.
Though no official programme has been released, it is understood that after a series of presentations on Saturday morning on subjects including the rule of law and electoral systems, the convention would break into commissions.
These commissions would then report back to a plenary on Sunday morning, after which a declaration would be adopted.
Meanwhile, the war of words around the convention has showed no sign of abating.
Zuma, speaking at the funeral of party stalwart Billy Nair, labelled the dissidents as ”adventurists”.
He urged those planning to leave the party to do so and ”leave us in peace”.
ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe said earlier this week the dissidents were driven not by ideology, but by ”anger and obsession with power”.
He said they were unable to accept that they had been voted out of power at the ANC’s Polokwane conference in December.
However Lekota told an audience in Bloemfontein on Wednesday that the convention was about constitutional principles that the leaders of the ANC had abandoned.
It was ”an independent movement guided and initiated by the fact that there are threats to — democracy”, he said. – Sapa