Nkosazana for Zuma, Cyril for us
SACP slams president for supporting ex-wife and vows to back Ramaphosa
“If President Jacob Zuma’s choice is Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, our choice is Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.”
So said the SACP which helped propel Zuma to power in 2007. SACP North West provincial secretary Madoda Sambatha used the late SACP stalwart Moses Kotane memorial lecture in Rustenburg to throw the gauntlet at Zuma for publicly backing Dlamini-Zuma to be the next ANC leader.
“The ANC NEC [national executive committee] said don’t speak about names. The first person to speak about a name was the ANC president. We are here to say if the president’s choice is Nkosazana, our choice is Ramaphosa,” Sambatha said.
Dlamini-Zuma is backed by the ANC Youth League, ANC Women’s League and the controversial Premier League – a lobby group led by the premiers of North West, Free State and Mpumalanga.
Further tearing into Zuma, SACP second deputy general secretary Solly Mapaila accused the president of disregarding the decisions and policies of the ANC. Mapaila said there was no way the ANC could re-inspire confidence and win back lost ground under Zuma’s leadership.
“To expect that we can turn the tide and convince people that we will stop corruption and corporate capture under the president’s leadership is unreasonable,” Mapaila said.
“We have arrived at the difficult decision that President Jacob Zuma must help salvage our revolution by resigning.”
However, Mapaila admitted that some of the problems currently facing the ANC were not new but a repetition of certain mistakes that were committed in the past and almost destroyed the governing party.
“In 1930, JT Gumede was removed from the position of ANC president and the position was taken over by Pixley ka Isaka Seme,” he said.
Mapaila also lashed out at the controversial Gupta family, close friends of Zuma, accusing them of running a parallel government in South Africa and of having “hijacked” Zuma.
When Ramaphosa, who delivered the keynote address at the memorial lecture took to the podium, the crowd went wild and sang: “We agree.”
In a thinly veiled attack on Zuma, Ramaphosa said there was a temptation for leaders not to listen to the masses. He said the radical economic transformation which had been adopted by Zuma and his backers should not only be just talk. Ramaphosa said the ANC was increasingly being associated with wrong things, such as corruption and narrow personal enrichment.
“The ANC is increasingly associated with precisely the kind of elite nationalism that the Morogoro conference proudly declared would not be the route pursued by the ANC once in power,” he said.
Ramaphosa called on the ANC to counter revelations by the SA Council of Churches in its damning report that South Africa was on the brink of becoming a mafia state.
Ramaphosa reiterated his call that there should be an independent judicial commission to thoroughly investigate all the allegations of state capture.
He highlighted how Kotane went about correcting wrong things in the movement and how he wanted an ANC that listened.
Earlier, there were claims that a small group of ANC members from the Bojanala region had been ferried in two taxis to boo Ramaphosa.
This prompted Sambatha to issue a warning: “Go and tell your handlers that we are going to find them.”