ANC court claim ‘manufactured’

THE legal team for the KwaZulu-Natal ANC has rejected an application brought before the Pietermaritzburg High Court to dissolve its provincial leadership, calling the allegations “manufactured”.

A rebel group of ANC members said the party’s provincial elective conference in November 2015 had been fixed to guarantee a win for its provincial chairperson, Sihle Zikalala.

They said there were irregularities that excluded a faction aligned to former chairperson and KZN premier Senzo Mchunu.

The group has asked the high court to declare the 2015 election illegal, thereby dissolving the Zikalala-led executive committee and force an election re-run.

The trial started on Wednesday. Acting for the ANC, advocate Greg Harpur said yesterday that all the facts raised by the “four lone applicants” who brought the case before the court would not withstand scrutiny.

Harpur said the applicants “can’t show that anyone had been deprived from voting”.

He said the applicants could only point out discrepancies over records of who could and could not vote, adding that this could have various explanations that were not nefarious.

However, he said the voting roll, which is missing from the court record, would have been able to verify who voted.

“The fact of the matter is that there is no voters’ roll and the court must assess the case on the available evidence,” Harpur said.

He said branches were responsible for verifying whether members vote or not, and could have raised concerns about the election process if they wished. “If branches felt prejudiced they could have appealed. There’s no record of any such appeal,” Harpur added.

“We have a situation where these four lone applicants’ own branch executive committees have never complained. How is it possible that these four lone applicants… can come to this court… to have the entire elective conference (cancelled)?”

He said an accusation of a tweet announcing the results – allegedly sent out 10 hours before the results were officially released – had been withdrawn by the applicants.

“The tweet could have easily been manufactured after the results were known,” Harpur added.

In reply, advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said there was sufficient evidence, and that case law showed that the rights of ANC members who brought the application had been deliberately ignored.

He said the ANC’s call for the elective conference had been illegal, as the party had failed to obtain a third of branches to agree to the “convening of the conference”.

The applicants ‘can’t show that anyone had been deprived of voting’