DURBAN, February 19 (ANA) – Internal and external forces will be looking to divide the African National Congress through its policy and elective national conferences this year, ANC KwaZulu-Natal chairman Sihle Zikalala warned on Sunday.
“These conferences will be written in history as [to] whether they build or break the ANC,” he told a provincial cadres forum at the Durban Exhibition Centre.
“Both the policy conference and the national conference will be scrutinised by the whole world. Some will look at these ANC conferences with the expectation that they will mean the demise of the African National Congress,” he said.
“[The naysayers] will be in South Africa, in Africa, and the rest of the world; those who wish for the ANC to be weak at a fast rate. On the other hand, there are those who will be expecting for the ANC to unite us, and [the ANC will] deeply discuss people’s problems in June/July at the policy conference.
“Therefore, those who will attend these conferences as delegates, they must know that this is one of the conferences that will go down in history either for building the ANC or for killing the ANC.
“Some are of the opinion that after this conference the ANC might not be in power come 2019, depending on how it is handled. And therefore those who attend as delegates will need to pay serious attention to issues of the ANC as a liberation movement and the future of the people of South Africa,” he said.
Zikalala then presented a preliminary document that outlined “the political overview and KwaZulu-Natal African National Congress perspective towards the 54th national conference”, in December this year. It is at this conference that the ANC’s next president will be chosen. He spoke in English and Zulu while reading from the document and stressed that it was a “first draft”.
“So those who are from the media who are with us here must know and understand that if you happen to need this document and get it during this week, even if you quote it, we are still going to update it and put in input from the previous week’s meeting of the alliance, and put in input from this meeting,” Zikalala said.
ANA is in possession of a copy of the draft document, which was not allowed to be given to journalists.
Reading from the document, Zikalala said the first two decades of South Africa’s democracy had seen good progress in building a legitimate state and democratic government and advances had been made in fighting poverty.
“However, the growing levels of inequality reflect momentous setbacks on the revolutionary character of that change. There is sufficient consensus in our movement and society in general that economic growth experienced largely in the second decade of our freedom did not translate into economic inclusion,” he said.
While the state had a better ability to undertake social spending, an environment was created where the well off would further prosper and the poor remained trapped in “poverty and economic marginalisation”.
“Overall, the transformation project has been fundamentally compromised by a lack of meaningful economic transformation and land redistribution to the majority of our people who have been at the receiving end of colonialism and apartheid.”
The impact of this was that poor people were impatient and not content as they felt the economic marginalisation. It was because of this that at the party’s 53rd national conference in Mangaung, the current period was declared a “second phase of transition” that was to focus on radical economic transformation.
“A sustained focus on radical economic transformation is of great necessity if we are to avoid a possibility of our democratic gains being overshadowed due to the persistent socio-economic legacy of colonialism of a special type,” he said.
Despite weaknesses facing the ANC in the current phase of the national democratic revolution, the party was by far the only credible leader of social transformation.
“However, this leadership role of progressive change in society cannot be guaranteed forever unless a significant stride is made in changing economic ownership patterns in favour of the poor,” he said.
– African News Agency (ANA)
