The ANC has beefed up its trouble-shooting Western Cape task team by sending five national leaders from outside the province to assist the temporary leadership body.
The task team’s mandate is to rebuild the chronically fractured and weakened provincial party, although its immediate aim is to ensure that the problems that rendered a recent regional conference invalid do not recur.
This is a slap in the face for Trevor Manuel, a national executive committee (NEC) member and the national planning minister. Manuel and Joe Phaahla, the deputy arts minister, approved the outcome of the Boland conference in Tulbagh in December, but complaints by the Western Cape ANC Women’s League persuaded the NEC to declare it invalid.
Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary general, would not reveal the identity of the deployees, but they will join the provincial task team to ensure that the regional conferences take place to choose delegates for the Western Cape’s long-overdue provincial conference on February 12.
Mantashe announced this week that the NEC had decided to reconvene the Boland conference “because of the number of irregularities that occurred”.
The women’s league delegates were barred from voting at the conference and it was also found that there were not enough branches present to constitute a quorum. Fifty-nine branches took part, five short of the requirement for the region.
“Mantashe told us that people should not allow pressure from anywhere to allow you to take wrong decisions,” said an ANC leader who attended.
Judy Hermans, the secretary of the Western Cape women’s league, said the organisation “felt vindicated” in its fight for the conference to be nullified. “We could not allow it because the gender provisions in the Constitution were ignored,” she said.
Conference reconvened
Mantashe announced that a second ANC regional conference would be held in the Boland before the end of January.
Hector Yabo, the proxy candidate for Marius Fransman, the deputy international relations minister who is tipped to take over the provincial chairmanship, was voted in at the Boland conference as Western Cape ANC chairperson.
However, Mantashe told Yabo in Worcester that his position is invalid and the conference will be reconvened.
Supporters of Mcebisi Skwatsha, Fransman’s rival and former Western Cape chairperson, left midway through the conference, complaining about irregularities.
“We feel justice has prevailed and we’re happy because things happened that were not supposed to happen,” said an ANC member who attended the conference.
“We believe Manuel and Phaahla just gave in to pressure from Fransman’s supporters.”
Jackson Mthembu, the ANC spokesperson, said t the NEC felt the Western Cape needed “more hands” to ensure that regional conferences took place as a prelude to the provincial conference.
But he insisted that the deployment is not a vote of no confidence in Manuel and Phaahla but a move to support them in a crucial period. “This is a move by the NEC to ensure that areas of disputes are kept minimal,” he said.
An ANC leader with intimate knowledge of the party in the Western Cape said that the problem was that Manuel and Phaahla tended to “act regional” although they had a national mandate.
“The problem with people who come from a province is they have a certain take on what is happening there and they tend to be part of some faction,” the source said.
Manuel was accused of factionalism after a meeting in Cape Town at the end of November last year. Some of those who attended claimed that he told them not to vote for members of the disbanded provincial executive committee, including Skwatsha.
Manuel denied this and said that the ANC top brass “did not want delegates to vote for people on a slate, ignoring everybody else”. But the Western Cape Umkhonto weSizwe Veterans’ Association accused him of not being objective.
Manuel campaigned for most of last year with Fransman in the Western Cape, where the latter was once a provincial minister. But he was implicated in a scandal in which journalists were paid bribes to publish positive stories about his political ally, former Western Cape premier Ebrahim Rasool.
Through his spokesperson Dumisa Jele, Manuel declined to comment.