Everybody knows about Mosiuoa Lekota, Mbhazima Shilowa and Mluleki George. But who are the other leading lights in the Shikota movement?
Lyndall Shope
When communications director general Lyndall Shope resigned from the ANC last week, she risked forfeiting a R1-million annual salary package and the wrath of her family, colleagues and party fellows. Why?
“If I hadn’t been in the ANC’s national executive committee I might not have left, but being in the NEC made me part of the leadership and decisions that I have to take responsibility for,” she told the Mail & Guardian this week.
Although Shope supported Thabo Mbeki at the ANC’s Polokwane conference, she was nominated from the floor by the ANC Youth League, where she cut her political teeth.
She feels she has neglected her responsibilities to South Africa’s youth. “[The youth should] play a more signiÂficant role in the different spheres of our country’s life. It’s a contribution I have failed to make with impact in our Youth League,” she wrote to the ANC in her resignation letter.
Ironically, it is the utterances of Youth League president Julius Malema and the decision to fire Mbeki and some premiers that prompted her decision to quit the party. “I would think: how can you talk to adults like this? I was a youth league leader for nine years. I would never have dreamed of doing some of the things that are being done now.”
She disputes the ANC’s view that the sacking of premiers and the president is not that serious because the movement has many skilled members. “When a staff member that I value goes, I want to do everything I can to keep that person because it is about how you value someone. [Firing premiers] causes disruption in the system and it seems to have become a trend.”
But her mother, struggle veteran Gertrude Shope, is not convinced that her daughter has made the right decision. “It took some time, and then she said I respect your decision even if it might be the wrong one.”
The ANC has not formally pronounced on whether the engineer-turned-civil servant will retain her position, but she says she is contractually bound until September 2010. “I accept that I am a deployed cadre, but the reality is that I applied for a job and got the job. Just because I have resigned from the ANC, it doesn’t change my contract. I will continue to implement government policy and just do political work the way other people play golf.”
Charlotte Lobe
Former NEC member and Free State ANC secretary Charlotte Lobe was the first woman to join the Shikota movement.
Lobe rose through the ranks of the ANC in the Free State after her political conscience was awoken at 14 years as a child prisoner in Bloemfontein, where she was interned because of graffiti at her school in Botshabelo.
After her release she joined the Botshabelo Youth and Student Congress and became the youngest national MP, at 30 years of age. She served as secretary of the Free State ANC and as ANC Women’s League spokesperson and was elected to the ANC’s NEC in Polokwane – despite vocally supporting a third term as party president for Thabo Mbeki.
Lobe now serves as secretary of the Shikota movement.
Anele Mda
The youngest member of the steering committee working towards the December 16 launch, Anele Mda is articulate and seems to be saying what young people want to hear – at least those keen to dissociate themselves from Malema. Her networking and fundraising skills first came to the fore in her one-woman campaign to raise money to start her own NGOs in Bizana and Port St Johns.
She opened an HIV/Aids information centre at the age of 17 and started the Growing Girls Group as well as Creative Young Women, intended to address the needs of young women.
She is determined that young people should be able to hold Shikota’s leaders accountable.
As a former ANC Youth League branch and provincial leader she concedes she may have failed young people by not speaking out about the wrongs in the ANC, but insists that is in the past.
“I can align that [failure] with the culture in the ANC that you don’t question the leadership,” says Mda.
Thozamile Botha
After returning from exile in 1990 Thozamile Botha was elected to the ANC NEC in 1991, but resigned before the end of his term in 1994. Unlike other prominent ANC figures who have crossed to Shikota, Botha has been vocal within party structures for years.
The former Eastern Cape director general resigned from the provincial government in 1997, complaining that his team did not cooperate with him.
His knowledge of housing and local government could come in handy for Shikota’s election manifesto. Until recently he advised Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu and is the former head of the ANC’s departments of local and regional government and housing. He was also a founding member of the National Housing Forum, a multiparty non-governmental negotiating body comprising business, communities, government, development organisations and political parties.
Phillip Dexter
The former South African Communist Party treasurer general, purged for criticising general secretary Blade Nzimande, brings insights in dealing with government and unions. His experience as an MP and particularly in Parliament’s labour, public service and finance committees, will be useful to the new party.
Dexter was a Western Cape branch organiser for Cosatu’s health affiliate, Nehawu, and an ANC NEC member.
He could prove useful in the party’s efforts to win the Western Cape.
Dexter lost popularity in the SACP when he publicly criticised Nzimande’s “Stalinist” leadership style and supported Willie Madisha’s claim that Nzimande had received an unaccounted-for donation of R500 000.
It will be interesting to see how he squares his Marxist views with the new party, considering that he wrote a document accusing the SACP of failing to advance socialism.