Mabuyane’s PEC hands in video footage
THIRTY minutes of video footage of last month’s disputed ANC Eastern Cape elective conference will be used as key evidence for looking into whether the conference was legitimate or not.
ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe told the Daily Dispatch in East London yesterday that the Oscar Mabuyane-led provincial executive committee (PEC) had submitted the footage to President Jacob Zuma’s team of ANC national working committee members on Monday.
The team spent Sunday and Monday in the Eastern Cape on a fact-finding mission as to whether the conference, which elected Mabuyane and his 35member team last month, was properly constituted.
“There is video footage of the conference which goes on for about 30 minutes. We are going to sit and go patiently through it.
“Only after watching it will we be able to write a full NWC report to the NEC. It’s the NEC that will decide [whether the PEC is a legitimate structure],” Mantashe said.
The video evidence was submitted by the PEC after they tabled a report on their own version of events leading to their election into office at the conference at East London’s ICC.
A team of former PEC members led by Phumulo Masualle, who contested a third term, submitted a complaint to Mantashe a few days after the conference.
The visit of Zuma and his top team to all eight ANC regions in the province on Sunday was a follow-up to that.
Last month’s conference ended up in chaos when delegates threw chairs at each other, resulting in at least 15 people being injured.
Mantashe said both groups were to blame for the chaos at the conference, adding: “To fight with chairs among themselves, that is a disgrace.”
He defended his decision to deploy Cyril Ramaphosa to the conference, saying this was one conference at which more ANC officials should have been deployed due to the nature of the tensions in the buildup to the election of Mabuyane into office.
This was after a group of disgruntled ANC members forced their way into the venue on day one of the conference, challenging the legitimacy of some of those who were accredited to vote at the conference.
The ANC NEC deployees decided to adjourn the conference a day later, allowing only conference delegates inside the parameters of the Regent Hotel, where the conference was held. But this too did not help, as the violence started inside the venue anyway. Ramaphosa has since apologised for the language he used when addressing the conference.
But Mantashe said Ramaphosa had no reason to apologise for calling the conference a “festival of chairs”.
“These comrades are complaining that Cyril came to address the conference. My point is that when there is a fight, it is even a bigger reason for officials to be here.
‘It’s a pity that only one official came [to East London] when for the KwaZulu-Natal conference, four officials went,” he said, referring to the 2015 conference whose outcomes have been nullified in court.
He said Ramaphosa was assigned by his office, and that the Amathole region – which is now questioning why Ramaphosa was here – was the very same region, along with Nelson Mandela Metro region, which invited President Zuma to address their regional conference without the knowledge of the Masualle-led PEC in March this year.
Ramaphosa is campaigning to take over from Zuma after the December conference, and the Eastern Cape conference delegates, as led by Mabuyane, have committed to support his candidacy. Amathole regional secretary Teris Ntutu and Nelson Mandela’s Andile Lungisa support Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. And Zuma has already declared that he was in support of a woman to take over.
Addressing Nelson Mandela regional conference on Sunday, Mantashe said he told the leaders: “You imported the president of the ANC [Zuma] to a regional conference and he went to address conferences in both Port Elizabeth and in Amathole without the knowledge of the PEC. Don’t deal with deployment factionally”.