Searching for salvation: Definitive week lies ahead for ANC after ConCourt IEC judgment

Political parties are set to meet the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) on Monday morning ahead of the commission’s deadline to announce whether it can hold a voter registration weekend.

The IEC held an urgent meeting this weekend following a Constitutional Court ruling on Friday which gave it three days to decide whether it can hold a voter registration weekend. Failing that, the court ruled that voters have until Friday, 10 September, to register at their local municipal offices before the voters’ roll would close again and the elections be proclaimed afresh, for a date between and including 27 October and 1 November.

Only first-time voters and those who haven’t previously registered, or those voters who have moved wards are required to register for the elections.

There is still uncertainty as to whether the Constitutional Court ruling left room for the registration of party candidates to be reopened, as glitches and infighting meant that the ANC didn’t register all its candidates in 94 municipalities, and risked losing power in a vast number of these, including in the Gauteng metros and in a number of KwaZulu-Natal councils. 

The Sunday Times reported that the party’s electoral chair, Kgalema Motlanthe, and Deputy Secretary-General Jessie Duarte, at the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting over the weekend, presented a report on the failure to register certain candidates, threatening that those responsible should face the consequences.

It is understood that the ANC could place more emphasis on physically handing in the lists of its candidate names at the IEC’s headquarters in Centurion rather than relying on the computer system again, from which the ANC complained some of its administrators were locked out of as the 9pm deadline on 23 August loomed. 

President Cyril Ramaphosa told ANC leaders at Friday’s NEC meeting – which preceded the party’s lekgotla planning session of its strategic objectives for the last part of the year – that the party would have to be innovative in its campaign under Covid-19 restrictions and with little resources. The party has failed to pay staff members in recent months and many have picketed and embarked on a go-slow.

“We must ensure that we use technology and other innovative methods that will reach millions of members and supporters in safe and dynamic ways and in line with Covid regulations,” Ramaphosa told leaders on Friday.

He said the party had begun interviewing mayoral candidates “to ensure that we entrust this important position to skilled and capable cadres”, but added that there should be more rigorous criteria for the appointment of municipal managers and chief financial officers. 

Ramaphosa said the NEC should brace itself and create the appropriate public messaging for when the State Capture inquiry makes its report public in October. He said this a couple of days before news broke that former president Jacob Zuma had been released on medical parole, barely two months after he was arrested and imprisoned for ignoring a court order to testify in front of the inquiry.

Ramaphosa concluded the inquiry’s hearings by testifying to it last month about his time as Zuma’s deputy.

“The ANC and this government will be criticised in the main due to an exaggeration of the role of the Deployment Committee and misrepresentation of its ambit, as well as for the management of the work our MPs do in Parliament and parliamentary structures,” he said, following his testimony last month on the importance of deployment.

“Specific allegations have been levelled against leaders and deployees of the movement and there is a concerted drive to tie these allegations to the organisation and portray a picture of a corrupt and incompetent ANC and ANC-government,” he said.

“We need to be ready to address these and develop concise messages before the report comes out.”

He said there was palpable anger and disillusionment with the current government, which should be addressed.

Zuma supporter and self-proclaimed “RET Champion”, Nkosentsha Shezi, welcomed the decision to place Zuma on medical parole, saying that this will “result in his release” following an imprisonment that was “substantively and procedurally questionable, inhumane, malicious and unlawful”.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-09-05-paroled-jacob-zuma-to-serve-rest-of-jail-sentence-in-system-of-community-corrections/

Meanwhile, the death last week of Kebby Maphatsoe, the former president of the Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans’ Association, brought ANC leaders together across factional divides to deliver tributes on Sunday.

ANC Chairperson Gwede Mantashe, who is associated with the Ramaphosa lobby, spoke at the memorial service in Protea Glen, Soweto, as did former North West premier Supra Mahumapelo, who has been closer to Zuma’s lobby. News24 quoted Johannesburg Mayor Jolidee Matongo as saying that Maphatsoe was at the forefront of forging unity within the ANC.

Maphatsoe, who died of a heart attack, in his last will and testament “specifically asked that his funeral be a site of unity rather than a site of division”. DM