‘We can’t apologise for corruption unnecessarily’
KWAZULU-NATAL provincial leader of the ANC says the perpetual association of the ruling party with corruption has been aided by its leaders who “unnecessarily apologise” to the public for being corrupt.
Kwazi Mshengu, chairperson of the ANC Youth League in KZN and MEC for Education, says the way the leaders of the party talk about corruption, they have even made the public believe the party is indeed corrupt.
Mshengu was addressing a provincial general council of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) in Durban yesterday. Before turning to his party and the corruption stigma that is beginning to weigh heavily on its image, he urged the union to clean its own image as it was being seen as corrupt and having a hand in all the ills in the country’s education sector.
“It’s like this thing of associating corruption with the ANC. You know an official that is corrupting a department; we don’t even know the (political) membership of that official and when you go the public we are told the ANC is corrupt. We even end up believing that indeed we are corrupt,” Mshengu said.
He implied that party leaders should not talk about corruption in public.
“Leaders of the ANC can be interesting… every time they talk, they talk of corruption and say we are corrupt. They talk less about the corruption of the DA in Tshwane Municipality, in Johannesburg Municipality. Every time, they say we need to rid ourselves of corruption because we are too corrupt.
“We even go to the society and say we are apologising for being corrupt but we need the corruption. I find it very strange,” he told the gathering.
He later clarified that he was not saying the party was free of corrupt people.
“I’m not saying we are clean in the ANC… where there is an instance of corruption, we must deal with it and deal with it decisively.”
Mshengu also used the three-day gathering, attended by over 300 delegates from across the province, to say that as alliance partner members they had a duty to build a non-racial society and provide quality education.
Speaking earlier, the union’s provincial chairperson, Phumlani Duma, lamented that the tripartite alliance which draws together the ANC, the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions and which was formed decades ago, was not working effectively.
He said they were being sidelined by the governing party after working together to win elections. “Do we only need each other merely because we are heading for the elections? As the alliance, we shouldn’t view each other as campaign partners only and thereafter the others are chased away and they are left alone on the table,” Duma said.