The national chairperson of South Africa’s ruling party, African National Congress(ANC), Gwede Mantashe has called on party members in the Free State to protect President Cyril Ramaphosa and his office at all costs.
Mantashe made the remarks at the ninth ANC Free State provincial elective conference taking place at the Imvelo Safari Lodge in Mangaung, Free State, on Saturday.
“We must protect Ramaphosa and the office occupied by Ramaphosa in the same way because if that office degenerates, the ANC is going to be weaker,” said Mantashe.
He was educating delegates about the role of the secretary-general in the ANC.
“The responsibility of secretary-general is not to take a particular stance saying the president is rubbish if he is embroiled in controversy.
“Your responsibility is to say that the president cannot be rubbish even if there is a fire pool and you go there and find a swimming pool. You come out there saying that I have seen a swimming pool but it can be used as a fire pool when there is a fire.
“You say it’s a swimming pool but there is a lot of water there in case of a fire, you can use it … Then you are a secretary-general of the ANC. You are not protecting the president but the office of the president.”
Mantashe was referring to a decision to support former president Jacob Zuma when he was embroiled in the Nkandla scandal.
He said people think they should stop protecting the office of the president “because there is a new person called Ramaphosa”.
“We must protect Ramaphosa and the office occupied by Ramaphosa in the same way because if that office degenerates, the ANC is going to be weaker. That is why in the organisation we do not talk about a leader, but we talk about leadership.
“Leadership is not a leader, it is a pyramid of people who are in the structures of the ANC at branch level, regional, provincial and national executive levels, the national working committee and the top seven.”
Advising the incoming provincial executive committee and additional members, Mantashe said, their roles also speak to the governance of the province.
“A key observation that we can confidently make here is that there is neither local nor provincial governance in the Free State.
“When spheres of government are dysfunctional, there is no government. One of the biggest disjunctures and rubbish I observed in the Free State is the demarcation. You have demarcated the province so much that it cannot even function.”
Mantashe said the tasks that lay ahead for the incoming provincial executive committee included the need to urgently revisit local government demarcation to ensure that people derived value from the municipalities.
“We must address the issue that in the Free State there is not a single municipality with a clean audit. There are 41 clean audits in the previous year. Unfortunately 22 of them are all in one province I cannot mention. So we need to speak openly about what we are going to do to address that.”
Mantashe said members must also assess the capability of the provincial government and pay attention to “the leakage of state resources”. “It is the function of the PEC to do so.”
