WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2009-05-19 Time: 11:00:02 Posted By: Jan
By Carien du Plessis
African National Congress leaders in the Western Cape have unleashed a scathing attack on the party’s secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe, and accused its national leadership of factionalism during a weekend lekgotla called to mull over its devastating election performance, the Cape Times can reveal.
Meanwhile, an internal report – a copy of which is in possession of the Cape Times – blames the party’s loss of the Western Cape to the opposition DA on infighting over the coloured vote, rather than on leadership failures.
It also says the party should now ensure that the “campaign against the DA is built to ensure that the DA is put under pressure at provincial and local government levels to deliver services to the poor, and is held accountable for the numerous failures of service delivery”.
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The ANC netted only 31.5 percent of the votes in the province it won control of in 2004 with 46 percent. The DA won outright with a majority of the votes cast, prompting a political backlash aimed at undermining and destabilising Premier Helen Zille’s administration.
The ANC’s Western Cape leadership is itself under threat. ANC insiders told the Cape Times that when the party’s national executive committee meets at the end of the month, a decision will be taken on disbanding the ANC’s provincial executive committee.
Mantashe warned the provincial executive at the weekend lekgotla in Plettenberg Bay that it faced dissolution. He blamed the ANC’s loss of the province on weak leadership.
Insiders have told the Cape Times that members of the embattled executive went as far as calling the party’s national executive “factionalist” for failing to listen to their demands, and also questioned Mantashe’s powers.
Mantashe is understood to have slammed the provincial leadership’s request that the task team sent in to manage the elections be disbanded. The team was set up under businessman Chris Nissen to support the provincial executive after the embarrassing failure to register provincial by-elections candidates in time.
While the national leadership stopped short of dismissing provincial leaders by disbanding the provincial exe- cutive, some NEC members felt provincial chairman Mcebisi Skwatsha should have “got the message” and volunteered to resign.
Sources within the provincial leadership said ANC provincial secretary Sipho Kroma wrote a letter last week ordering the disbandment of the election team. But Mantashe put his foot down, saying only the national leadership could order this.
The special election structures comprise provincial SACP and Cosatu leaders, as well as some ANC leaders sympathetic to former president Thabo Mbeki, and who did not make the cut during the province’s chaotic leadership elections last year, when a large body of branches met at a different venue and later formed the nucleus of Cope’s Western Cape support base.
Nissen’s efforts were slam-med in a report by Kroma at the lekgotla on Friday evening, after Mantashe had left.
The report was later withdrawn on the recommendation of deputy parliamentary Speaker and former Cape Town mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo, on the grounds that some in the meeting felt it was too personal and lacked “political substance”.
Kroma’s report blamed “some” in the provincial election structures for focusing too much on pushing Nissen as the ANC’s premier candidate in February, and paying too little attention to building election structures.
This despite the fact that Skwatsha, provincial treasurer and former premier Lynne Brown, and deputy provincial secretary Max Ozinsky topped the provincial list, the report said.
“The effect of this campaign was to further reinforce the idea that the ANC did not represent coloured voters,” the report says. Brown was later named by the national leadership as the province’s shadow premier.
The report also blames a so-called “Home for All” faction, named for a campaign run by Ebrahim Rasool when he was still premier of the province, for presenting the party’s current provincial leadership in a negative light.
The report notes that “by and large the ANC has held its own in African areas, notwithstanding some losses to COPE”.
It concludes that a political strategy was needed for the province, with “a conscious plan to change the impressions which have been created in the mind of the public of a divided ANC in the province which is anti-coloured, corrupt and Africanist”.
It says the party should now ensure that the “campaign against the DA is built to ensure that the DA is put under pressure at provincial and local government levels to deliver services to the poor, and is held accountable for the numerous failures of service delivery”.
The SACP at the weekend also called for the dissolution of the provincial leadership.