Sam Kwelita: ANC defector who made COPE a big player
SAM Kwelita, who has died at the age of 54, was a leading member of the ANC provincial government in the Eastern Cape.
In 2009 he led disaffected Thabo Mbeki loyalists in the province into the new Congress of the People, which was formed in 2008 after the former president was “recalled” by the ANC.
He was elected COPE’s Eastern Cape chairman. The party won an extraordinary 1.3 million votes, 7.4% of the national vote, in the 2009 election, and seemed set to become a major force in South African politics.
Instead, it was all but destroyed by a debilitating leadership dispute between the two founders, Mbhazima Shilowa and Mosiuoa Lekota.
Kwelita was part of the faction that supported the leadership claims of Shilowa and refused to recognise the legitimacy of Lekota’s leadership.
When his faction lost its court battle to have Lekota’s leadership declared invalid, Kwelita found himself out in the cold.
He was expelled on the grounds that he had not renewed his party membership. He took the party to court and his expulsion was overturned. It was a hollow victory because the party, along with his political career, was all but wiped out in the 2014 elections.
Kwelita was born on June 19 1960, the second of six children, on a farm in Aliwal North, where his parents worked. When they divorced and his father left, his mother and the children were in a precarious position.
Kwelita, who was in his teens and had to walk 10km to school and back, objected to spending his off hours working on the farm and tensions with the farmer grew.
His mother pre-empted what she feared was inevitable eviction and took the family to Dimbaza outside King William’s Town, where she found a job as a domestic worker.
She left Kwelita with his elder brother in Queenstown, where he attended the local high school and got involved in student politics — which heated up seriously after the 1976 student uprising.
He spent more time as an organiser for the Congress of South African Students than in class and was still in matric in his early 20s, at which point his political activities got him expelled.
Through the intervention of the South African Council of Churches, which recognised his potential, he was allowed back to finish matric.
He then wanted to follow his friends into exile but was told to stay in the Eastern Cape and
FREE SPENDER: Sam Kwelita was criticised for the misuse of public funds organise for the United Democratic Front. He worked as a supervisor at sweet and clothing factories in King William’s Town. His work for the UDF got him detained by the Security Branch several times, once for six months.
When the ANC was unbanned, Kwelita became a regional co-ordinator for the party in King William’s Town and a member of the ANC’s task team for the Border region.
In 2005, as MEC for local government and housing in the Eastern Cape, he admitted to parliament that most municipalities in the province were on the verge of financial meltdown.
Only two out of more than 40 had received unqualified audits. Many had not submitted financial reports for eight years.
In 2006 he was roasted by his own portfolio committee for watering down a report that described the collapse of a municipality in Butterworth. The original report found rampant abuse of public funds and gross nepotism. It found the post of municipal manager was held by two people, one of them facing theft and fraud charges.
Kwelita was also heavily criticised for spending R100 000 of public money on his private residence in Beacon Bay. He said it was for security.
In 2007, when he was MEC for social development, he incurred the wrath of the Constitutional Court for spending millions of rands of taxpayers’ money to oppose a R5 000 claim from a disabled woman whose grant had been terminated without notice. Justice Zak Yacoob described the behaviour of his department as “indefensible”.
He was accused of making a mockery of the Mbeki government’s pledge to put people first, and the opposition demanded he be fired.
While still a member of the provincial executive, he joined COPE after strenuously denying that he had any intention of defecting from the ANC.
Kwelita, who had been suffering from diabetes, is survived by his wife Nodumo and six children. — Chris Barron
His work for the UDF got him detained by the Security Branch several times