Dissidents in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) said on Sunday they want to win next year’s general election, as they move to launch a new party to rival South Africa’s dominant political force.
“We do not underestimate the work that lies ahead … with the elections coming” in just a few months, a breakaway leader, former Gauteng premier Mbhazima Shilowa, told reporters.
“We want to become the next government in the provinces and at the national level,” he said.
“If the ANC wants to engage with us, we will be able to engage with them,” he added.
Dissident leaders were meeting on Sunday to decide on a name for their new party, which they plan to launch on December 16, with general elections expected a few months later.
Outside their gathering in Johannesburg, about 150 supporters sang in praise and carried placards that read: “We are claiming our country back. Rise and be counted now.”
Thousands of delegates attended a convention on Saturday, which crafted a platform for the party, calling for reforms that would make the president directly elected by voters, rather than chosen in Parliament.
They also called for social cohesion, political tolerance and respect for basic rights — including the freedom to vote for any party.
Analysts say that the new party has little chance of unseating the ANC, which now dominates South African political life after leading the anti-apartheid struggle and bringing Nelson Mandela to the country’s presidency.
The ANC won more than two thirds of the votes in the last election. The main opposition Democratic Alliance, perceived as a party for white South Africans, poses little serious threat.
Shilowa told the Sunday Independent in an interview that the new party was not trying to become a new opposition.
“We want to be in the government in 2009. We are very clear that we are not doing this just to be another opposition,” he said.
“It is about believing in ourselves and about South Africans believing that this new formation we are going to put in place will contest for political power, not just participate in the elections,” he told the paper.
“This is just the beginning of a new South African party that will be rooted in the majority of all our people, all of them, black and white, rich and poor,” he added.
Divisions within the ANC emerged last December, when Jacob Zuma unseated former president Thabo Mbeki as the party’s leader following a long power struggle.
Their differences turned bitter after Zuma’s allies forced Mbeki to resign the presidency in September, which proved to be the spark that led to the breakaway movement.
Mbeki has not given his support to the new movement, but told Zuma in a letter leaked to the press last week that he would not campaign for the ANC ahead of the polls.
Earlier this year Zuma had vowed that the ANC would “rule until Jesus comes back”.
Now he is taking the splinter group more seriously, and planned his own rally on Sunday in Soweto in a symbolically important show of support.
Even if the new party cannot unseat the ANC, they could win enough seats to strip the party of its super-majority in Parliament, forcing negotiations at least on major issues. — AFP