Ousted premier warns ANC may lose 2019 poll

OUSTED KwaZulu-Natal ANC chairman and premier Senzo Mchunu has warned the ruling party might lose the elections in the province in 2019 if the deep divisions ravaging the organisation were not resolved.

Mchunu was addressing the media after making his input in a closed session during a report-back on last week’s court judgment which declared the ANC’s 2015 provincial elective conference unlawful.

The meeting held at Durban’s Olive Convention Centre was attended by more than 300 branches who form part of the so-called ANC rebels who took the party to court in July last year asking for a rerun of the elective conference, citing various irregularities.

The ANC rebels are headed for a showdown with the party’s provincial executive committee (PEC) which they want removed following the court ruling by Judge Jerome Mnguni, which came after complaints by a faction supporting Mchunu, who lost to Sihle Zikalala in a bitter battle.

The current PEC, led by Zikalala, has indicated that it would appeal the court ruling which renders it null and void but the ANC rebels have vowed they have a strategy to counter that.

They want the PEC to vacate the ANC’s offices in central Durban.

However, Mchunu on Sunday extended an olive branch to the current ANC leaders, saying both factions needed to find one another.

Mchunu said while they would wait for the ANC national executive committee to deal with the matter, the ANC in the province could not fold its hands and do nothing about the divisions.

“I think while [I] agree we have to wait for the NEC to give us a way forward, I must say it is the NEC that is well placed to decide what needs to be done.

“But at the same time we think that we in the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal need to begin to find one another.

“If you look at divisions of the ANC in this province, if you look at the poison that has been planted right down to the branch, if you look at the wrongs that were committed to some of the comrades, especially those who were due for whatever kind of deployment, starting with those who were summarily fired from the executive following the new PEC coming into power that time.

“And what they subsequently did to some comrades in the name of them having associated themselves with me. I always think and look back at that pain.

“I think we need to stop the politics of saying so and so won and is now the chairman of branch, chairman of the province, president of the ANC and then you now have the power to be a real henchman where you do anything that you want without any principle.”

Mchunu warned that powers given to the PEC needed to be exercised with caution and responsibility.

The ANC in the province is deeply divided on the support of who should be the next leader of the party, with the current PEC behind former African Union chairwoman and President Jacob Zuma’s ex-wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and the other faction supporting Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.