The African National Conference (ANC) hopes to reconvene its KwaZulu-Natal provincial elective conference before the end of next month.
This after the provincial conference which was scheduled for this weekend was successfully interdicted by some disgruntled party members. On Saturday, the party announced that it had decided to cancel its consultative conference. The ANC in KwaZulu-Natal had decided to hold a consultative conference after the court interdict but chaos erupted last night when some delegates rejected the decision.
ANC National Executive Committee member Nocawe Mafu says they are resolving challenges to enable the conference to go ahead.
“We also want to register the fact that the last NEC did give a green light for the conferences to continue including the conference of KZN. And we are very confident that in the process of dealing with whatever challenges we will be able to deal with them and this conference will be reconvened before the 28th of July or the 31 of July which is the deadline for the conferences of the ANC to sit,” says Mafu.
Meanwhile, the KwaZulu-Natal ANC Task Team is planning to go back to the Pietermaritzburg High Court on Monday to seek an early date for it to state its case. Provincial Coordinator Sihle Zikalala says delegates who attended the abandoned provincial conference have instructed the provincial task team to challenge what he says was an unjust decision by a judge to grant the disgruntled members an interdict without hearing both sides.
“We are going to explore avenues to challenge the conduct of the judge. We believe that it undermines the independence of the judiciary, the view of the meeting, which is the view we agreed on, we will engage with the court seek to apply for an early return to present our case on matters raised. So we will be applying for that on Monday, so that’s we have been instructed by delegates to do,” says Zikalala.
Zikalala has also warned that ANC members who successfully interdicted this weekend’s provincial elective conference could face disciplinary action. This group were made up mainly of members from the Moses Mabhida region. They approached courts to halt the conference citing irregularities in the run up to the conference.
He adds, “We would like to probe the conditions under which the ANC has been taken to court by these comrades and secondly if they are then they might be tantamount to breaching the discipline of the ANC. But secondly we would also be looking at and see how we engage issues, if there are genuine issues of concern. The view generally of all delegates who were here, tasked us that we must institute disciplinary action against these people who have taken the ANC to court. We will then be doing that check, the conditions under which these comrades have taken the ANC to court that includes whether they had exhausted all issues internally.”
The provincial task team also apologised to party national chairperson Gwede Mantashe, who was heckled and booed by some delegates while trying to address delegates on the first day of the conference.
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