The ANC has identified the Congress of the People (Cope) as the main threat to the ruling party in the 2011 local government elections.
The ANC has also conceded that in the April election it lost ground in every province except KwaZulu-Natal.
The assessment is contained in a report on the party’s election performance, presented at the national executive committee meeting at the weekend by ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe. The report was leaked to the Mail & Guardian.
In it Mantashe ordered provinces to introduce programmes that will ”undermine” Cope support as a way of regaining voter support the ANC lost to its breakaway faction in the election.
”For the purposes of local government elections, each province must determine where the concentration of Cope is and develop more coherent programmes to undermine that support,” said Mantashe.
The report did not specify which programmes are needed to counter Cope, but an NEC member who attended the meeting told the M&G that part of the ANC’s plan was to continue persuading more people, in particular leaders with sufficient support, to return to the ruling party from its rival. ”The strategy is that what we do right attracts people back and keeps them in the fold, so we should focus on what we should do right,” said the NEC member, who asked to remain anonymous.
He said by getting people to return to the ANC fold and publicly parading defectors the ANC hoped to discredit Cope as a legitimate political force.
This was preferable to resuscitating the ANC’s initial approach of dubbing Cope a party of ”angry losers”.
The ANC’s worst showing in the April election was in the Western Cape, where its support declined by 13%, followed by Northern Cape and Free State, where it took a 10% hit, and the Eastern Cape, where it polled 9% less than in 2004. The decline was less marked in other provinces: 6% in North West, 5% in Gauteng, 4% in Limpopo and 1% in Mpumalanga.
Cope is now the official opposition in four provinces: Northern Cape, Limpopo, Eastern Cape and Free State. The Western Cape is the only province ruled by an opposition party, Helen Zille’s DA.
The ANC report indicates that Cope made inroads into the ruling party’s support base. ”If we can appreciate the fact that a number of key leaders of the ANC defected to Cope, we will equally understand that we were swimming against a strong stream,” it said.
Mantashe acknowledged that other political parties pose a threat to the ANC, but not to the same extent as Cope. He told the NEC meeting that in four months the breakaway group had managed to establish itself as ”a national political party, a trend contrary to many opposition parties”.
Cope is the third-largest party in the National Assembly, with 30 seats.