CALLS TO BAN VBS-LINKED LOOTERS

PUBLIC sector union Nehawu has called on the ANC to spread the removal of those implicated in the VBS Mutual Bank looting scandal to all provinces…

ANC national executive committee member Nocawe Mafu has warned party delegates at the party’s KwaZulu-Natal provincial list conference to elect people with good standing and character in society to represent them in Parliament.

Nocawe said it would take people with integrity to help the party win elections next year.

She was addressing hundreds of delegates from 70% of party branches in the province who gathered at the Durban University of Technology yesterday.

“We should always make it a point that the (list) process represent every fibre and every being of the ANC,” she said.

“You nominate people that you know at the end of the day who know and understand and live the character of the ANC, because these people are going to be the face of the ANC, and they that are going to contest elections,” Mafu said.

However, before the start of the conference, ANC provincial spokesperson Nomagugu Simelane-Zulu said delegates would not be stopped from electing members of questionable character as long as they had not been convicted of criminal offences.

The conference is tasked with selecting ANC candidates to be party MPs and MPLs after next year’s general elections.

Simelane-Zulu said the branches had the right to decide who they wanted to send to Parliament. But she said delegates would be guided by the ANC’s “Through the Eye of the Needle” document in electing public representatives. “The policy of innocent until proven guilty is the law in South Africa, and will apply to everyone,” said Simelane-Zulu.

It was still not clear whether embarrassed former Home Affairs minister Malusi Gigaba would make it back to the MP list after he resigned from President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Cabinet, and later from Parliament, after the Appeal and Constitutional Courts ruled he had lied about his involvement in the Fireblade Aviation saga at OR Tambo International Airport.

The result of party public representative elections would be known this morning.