N Cape premier warns against factional battles
NORTHERN Cape Premier Zamani Saul warned ANC members using its national general council (NGC) in June to reawaken the battle for control of the party.
Saul was speaking in Kimberley during the ANC’s cake-cutting ceremony to mark the party’s 108th birthday.
The event in Galeshewe was attended by the ANC’s national leadership including its president Cyril Ramaphosa and formed part of the party’s campaign trail in the province as it drummed up support for its January 8 birthday on Saturday.
“As the province, we hope that this first anniversary celebration after the 2019 general elections will ensure that it is fit and we are going to implement the manifesto of the ANC and build a solid foundation as a move towards the NGC,” Saul said.
“We hope that the NGC will not provide a platform for factional activities but will provide the ANC… an opportunity to reflect and we should agree on how best to take our programme of radical economic transformation forward,” he said.
The ANC’s campaign trail yesterday also included a visit to the grave site of the party’s founding secretary-general Sol Plaatje.
Saul called on ANC leaders to learn from the selfless activism displayed by Plaatje’s generation.
“They knew when they formed the ANC that they were not the ones who would bask in the shadow of freedom, but their responsibility was to put themselves in the position of the disadvantaged to create an advantage for a future generation,” Saul said.
He said current leaders had their own struggles of poverty, unemployment and inequality to wage, including the contentious land issue, which he said was more pronounced in the Northern Cape.
Saul said the governing party had to reverse the socioeconomic impact of colonial conquest by expropriating land without compensation.
He said: “In the Northern Cape in terms of racial disaggregation 93% of the population is black, African and coloured, and only 7% white. The 7% own 85% of the land in the Northern Cape and the 93% only own 13%, and 2% is owned by the state… ”
Ramaphosa said he received complaints from traditional leaders in the province who spoke about the dispossession of their land.
“As they were moved away, their water rights were taken away from them and distributed to a number of white farmers in this area.
“Our land reform process, which includes expropriation without compensation, is what is going to happen and it will also happen here in the Northern Cape,” he said.