Some party members now wanted the conference to be convened before the December national elective congress
The ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC) will this weekend receive the feedback from a legal opinion into whether not the party should to appeal a high court ruling that declared KwaZulu-Natal’s Provincial Executive Committee (PEC) unlawful.
The meeting of the NEC comes a day after the PEC ignored the party’s calls for restraint and filed notice of intention to appeal the decision.
Secretary general Gwede Mantashe said the NEC would discuss the matter, but would not allow it to distract from other important organisational matters.
“We will discuss it as the last item. The reason for that is we don’t want it to derail us from discussing organisational issues and thus focus on one item because it is emotional,” Mantashe said.
“We are tabling reports of all the work that was done, reporting about the national policy conference, reporting about everything that has happened since the last national conference”.
Party officials are meeting for an ordinary sitting of the NEC after a special meeting last week, where the party appeared reluctant to appeal.
It had appointed a task team to re-convene a new Provincial Elective Conference, with Mantashe saying, “for all intents and purposes the PEC will be disbanded” pending the outcomes of the legal opinion.
Earlier this month, the Pietermaritzburg High Court ruled that irregularities were present during the 2015 KwaZulu-Natal conference and that the constitution of the province’s PEC was unlawful.
At the time a legal bid had been launched against the ANC leadership in the Free State over the overdue convening of its elective conference, which was meant to have been held by August.
Some party members now wanted the conference to be convened before the December national elective congress, to prevent the province from going to conference with led by a PEC with an expired mandate.
While the NEC has advised structures against holding elective conferences beyond the September 30, Mantashe said the Free State was one of the provinces that would need to convene its conference beyond that time-frame as it was long overdue.
“We said where conferences are long overdue we can’t delay them anymore because we can be challenged on the basis of an expired mandate. I think the Free State falls in the category. There will be a few of them that fall under that category,” he said.