Top six look to ancestors for guidance
ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa yesterday described the governing party as having been “down and out” and requiring ancestral intervention.
He was explaining the decision by the ANC Top 6 national officials in their first meeting to visit the graves of the party’s former presidents and other key leaders.
Speaking in a mixture of Xhosa, Zulu and English after meeting AmaRharhabe Queen Noloyiso Sandile at the Mngqesha Great Place in King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape, Ramaphosa said the party’s officials did what Africans do in the face of misfortune.
“We go back to our ancestors to talk to them,” he said.
Yesterday, the party top brass also paid their respects at the grave of another founding ANC leader, Walter Benson Rubusana, in East London.
“We visited Rubusana’s grave to ask for a way forward,” he said.
Ramaphosa said ANC leaders wanted the values and principles that guided the party’s founders in establishing and growing Africa’s oldest liberation movement to be among them.
Tomorrow, Ramaphosa and other ANC leaders are scheduled to visit Nelson Mandela’s grave in Qunu “to draw wisdom”.
Ramaphosa vowed to put the ANC right and for it to be Mandela’s ANC that worked for all South Africans. Earlier yesterday, while speaking at Nqadu Great Place in Willowvale, where he visited Xhosa King Zwelonke Sigcawu, Ramaphosa said he would ensure that the party was united under his leadership.
“The NEC must also be unified. I told them as the president that there is no one who will depart and say something else that is against the ANC.
“We have entered a new phase as the ANC. We have entered a phase of unity, a phase of renewal and rebuilding of the ANC,” he said.
Before his election, Ramaphosa used his presidential campaign to tear into the Gupta family, which was allegedly using its proximity to Zuma to influence cabinet appointments and state procurement.
Yesterday, he said the ANC must be renewed so that it did not serve narrow interests any more.
“We are doing this so that the ANC becomes an ANC that will work for the whole of society.
“We do not want it to be the ANC that works for certain individuals or certain families.
“All the bad things we were complaining about, all the bad things that were happening in the past, we want to put them behind us and move forward,” Ramaphosa said.