President Cyril Ramaphosa. (Photo by Mlungisi Louw/Volksblad/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa says the party is still discussing whether to disband the Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provincial executive committees (PECs) because of their poor election results.
Speaking to Mail & Guardian at the 25th annual Joe Slovo commemoration on Monday, Ramaphosa said the ANC national executive committee (NEC), which met in Cape Town on Monday night, has not yet decided on the disbandment.
The party’s leadership is in the Western Cape ahead of its 113th birthday celebrations, which will take place at Khayelitsha Stadium this weekend.
Last year, after meeting the Gauteng PEC, ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula said a decision on the future of both provinces would be made in January.
“We will convene after the January 8 [statement rally] to finalise the work in terms of the NEC because we are almost at the end of the year,” Mbalula said at the time. “We would have met this week in the final NEC meeting but we have got the state visits that are taking place back-to-back and we also have the SACP [South African Communist Party] national congress.”
He said the three options were to maintain the status quo and “leave the PEC as it is”, provide reinforcements based on the needs of the provinces; or “totally overhaul and reorganise, and that can only be done through disbandment”.
“We told them that if there’s a fourth option you want to bring to the table in terms of the situation we find ourselves in, you can do that,” Mbalula said at the time.
Speaking to M&G on Tuesday, an ANC national working committee member said the party did not discuss the disbandment issue at this week’s NEC.
“The NEC last night focused on the January 8 statement,” the source said.
Another NEC source told the publication that the purpose of the meeting was only to draft the January 8 statement.
The source said the NEC would meet next week in Johannesburg to discuss the disbandment issue and other matters.
ANC national spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri also confirmed that the party only discussed the January 8 statement in its first NEC meeting of the year.
Speaking to journalists on Monday on the sidelines of Joe Slovo’s commemoration, the general secretary of the SACP, Solly Mapaila, raised concerns about the possible disbandment, particularly in Gauteng.
Mapaila said the SACP would leave it to the ANC to decide what it does with both the provinces.
“What has been worrying us is the expression by Helen Zille of the Democratic Alliance, the expression that seeks to attack the Gauteng government, that seeks to attack comrade Panyaza [Lesufi] as the leader of the ANC precisely because he refused to include the ANC and the PEC in Gauteng in the provincial unity government,” he said.