The African National Congress (ANC) was lauded for its moral authority in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, but many veterans of that era are deeply disillusioned by the party’s actions today.
As delegates prepare to elect a new leader to succeed South African President Jacob Zuma, the ANC faces falling public support, a reputation for corruption and the threat of a damaging split between rival factions.
The activists who stood alongside former ANC leader Nelson Mandela in the struggle against white-minority rule say the party bears little semblance to its storied glory days, given its current reputation for putting personal interests above national needs.
Photo: AFP
“I am not proud of being an ANC member that is led by this lot. I am proud of the history of the ANC,” said Frank Chikane, a prominent figure in the anti-apartheid fight.
Chikane, a priest who grew up in Soweto, South Africa, led protests through the 1970s and 1980s, and was regularly detained by the state — as well as being targeted in an assassination attempt when police poisoned his clothes.
“What is happening out there now is not the ANC,” he said. “In the past we thought the enemy was outside, now the enemy is inside.”
He urged party members to “stop the rot” when they gather to elect a leader and other senior officials at a five-day conference starting today.
Much of the criticism of the current ANC focuses on Zuma, who is seen as backing his former wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to succeed him as party chief.
Her main rival is Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, with the vote result expected tomorrow or early next week.
Zuma, who has ruled South Africa since 2009, will remain as the country’s president ahead of the 2019 general election.
He has been engulfed by multiple graft scandals, including last year being found guilty of violating the constitution after he resisted paying back public money used to lavishly upgrade his private residence.
The ANC has shrugged off calls to act against Zuma and its lawmakers have voted down several motions of no confidence against him.
“The leadership of the last decade has ridden roughshod over the ANC constitution,” Trevor Manuel, another ANC stalwart, said in a stinging speech last month.
“We need an ANC that will recognize that it has lost its way,” added Manuel, who campaigned against apartheid governments before becoming Mandela’s minister of finance.
“Right now, it appears too self-serving to be interested in the future of South Africa and the needs of its people,” he said.
Some analysts say the party risks a formal split between the Zuma and anti-Zuma camps before the 2019 election.
In local polls last year, its vote fell to 54 percent, its lowest ever, while it lost control of three key cities to the opposition Democratic Alliance, including Pretoria and Johannesburg.
Last year, some veterans — including Denis Goldberg, one of Mandela’s closest allies — founded the “For the sake of our Future” group to try to influence their party.
In an open letter ahead of the conference it said the “leadership of the ANC is paralyzed and unable to deal with ill-discipline, incompetence and corruption that point directly to the highest office in the land.”
Zuma himself is a so-called “stalwart” — he was imprisoned with Mandela on Robben Island for 10 years.
However, Sipho Pityana, a former activist who became a wealthy mining businessman, said it was a “disgrace” that the ANC had failed to remove the president from power.
“The image of Zuma has become the image of the ANC,” Pityana said. “The ANC needs to accept that it is morally bankrupt and corrupt to the core, and reversing the damage is going to take years.”
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
RSS