Matuma Letsoalo interviewed Fikile Mbalula, head of campaigns for the ANC and a former leader of the ANC Youth League
How ready is the ANC for this year’s election?
Our election campaign is gathering momentum and the kind of support we have been receiving in the past few months is a reflection the hard work by ANC volunteers on the ground. Our opponents are all out on a smear campaign. There is too much emphasis on individual characters.
The whole lot of investigation against ANC leaders … I can imagine that when people want to win votes they want to win them on the basis of negativity of the ANC, not on the positive card.
Can you elaborate or give examples of people who are being targeted for the smear campaign?
The whole saga on Kgalema [Motlanthe] and his personal life. Manufacturing things about individuals to smear the ANC leadership like that, to the extent that people say this and that happened to them, is a worrying factor. The ANC will never do that.
What is important to us is what we can do to change the lives of people. We don’t choose the strategies of other political parties.
To appease the middle strata of society, most opposition parties are hopping on the question of negativity. They go all out to project the ANC as the party that is morally bankrupt. If we were to go down that path I think we would be degenerating the campaign. As a party we are not going to commit the error of putting criminals on the [electoral list]. If we do that, we will be attacked. What is interesting is that people are not targeting us on policy matters, because those would be very difficult to attack.
What impact do you think the Carl Niehaus saga will have on the ANC’s election campaign?
That’s an individual issue. It’s a matter of a leader in the ANC who happens to face personal challenges. We appreciate that he will now attend to his problems outside the ANC. It’s unfortunate that he is an individual with such problems. He is a capable comrade with a good track record. I really appreciate his courage to stand up against what is wrong.
Do you think what he has done will dent the image of the ANC?
This can happen to any party. You can have anyone in any party who can be a convict. The question is how the party deals with that question, and that can either drown or enhance the ANC’s image. How the ANC responded to this matter I think is correct. I think it will enhance its image, but our detractors want to sink us with the Niehuas saga. They won’t succeed.
Even when the Republicans in the US tried to drown Obama on previous childhood scandals about drugs, they could not stop the train of change.
The same is true today. Whether people can bring the Carl Niehuas saga or Kagalema Motlanthe’s personal life to the public’s attention, or any other ANC leader in future, they will never stop the train of change. It is too late for that.
ANCYL president Julius Malema has also been under criticism after his remarks about Education Minister Naledi Pandor
Julius Malema is what our opponent has identified as the soft belly of the ANC. But people are making a mistake because the Youth League is an organ of the ANC and, in the context of how it is defined, it is allowed to commit such mistakes and learn out of those. The key question for a youth leader is to own up to mistakes.
What is the ANC’s strategy to win the elections?
We are going to target the new entrants into the system. Out of the 22-million registered voters this year, 3-million of those are new. We are talking to them. We are doing our best to convince them to vote for the ANC.
Is the ANC confident that it will win all provinces?
There are provinces that have been a challenge to us over the years and there are provinces where we have doubled our victory in the past years. In others, like the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Cape, we had slight victory margins. Although we think we will do well in the Northern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape is going to be a battleground. We are looking at retaining what we have now. That is going to require a lot of work. It’s going to be a key challenge for our political work.
The question of absolute rule [in the Western Cape] has been elusive for us. We think we can do better and we will do better if we consolidate our strategy.
It’s a unique case in the overall of our election work. We are contesting coloureds and our support base is not coming from the coloured. Is going to be critical to acknowledge that the coloureds are the majority.
Would you consider having someone like Western Cape Premier Lynn Brown as the face of the party to attract more coloured support?
The determination of individuals is insignificant. We are concentrating on the party. Anybody can lead. Unfortunately we don’t vote for individuals but for policies. Nobody owns any position.
Is the Eastern Cape also a worry for the ANC, given the fact that Cope seems to have made inroads in what was regarded as the ANC’s stronghold?
The myth that the Eastern Cape has been won over is being spread by our new political opponent [Cope]. They declared in advance that they are going to snatch the Eastern Cape from the ANC. The onus is on those people to prove that.
Now that former president Nelson Mandela has publicly endorsed the ANC, do you expect the same from Thabo Mbeki?
I don’t think he will endorse the ANC; we don’t even hope for that. He is aggrieved. He has not hidden his emotional posture and his anger. You all know that he is bitter. From a subjective point of view, I think we must give him space to go through all those particular issues.