By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The African National Congress (ANC) national executive committee (NEC) has instructed its party members to go for an outright victory in 2024 national elections.
President Cyril Ramaphosa announced this during his closing address after the party’s four-day NEC on Monday.
The ANC has run the national government since 1994. It also governs eight of South Africa’s nine provinces and most of the 257 metropolitan, district and local municipalities.
“We have decided that, in May, we will hold our elections strategy workshop, so that our organisation prepares itself for a decisive victory in the 2024 elections,” said Ramaphosa.
The ANC has formulated and adopted a framework of engagement for when it goes into coalition governments, with recent polling suggesting the party might drop below 50% in next year’s elections.
Ramaphosa said the party’s 55th national elective conference mandated the elected leadership to adopt a framework for managing coalitions at the local government level, but it should rather prioritise getting an outright majority because coalitions have proved unstable.
“These frameworks are about ensuring that local governments across the country are about the people, are functional, and they prioritise the provision of basic services to our communities,” said Ramaphosa.
The ANC has tasked its secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula, with engaging other parties and attempting to get their buy-in in terms of this framework ahead of next year’s national elections.
Ramaphosa said the ANC needed to make it clear that it was working hard to regain the trust of the majority of South Africans.
“As the ANC, we need to regain our people’s trust through addressing their immediate needs, such as the electricity crisis, so that our country does not find itself in the unfortunate position of being governed by unstable and incoherent coalitions,” said Ramaphosa.
He added that these unstable coalitions were eroding structural reforms which his party had attempted to put in place.
Ramaphosa said: “SA cannot afford this disaster, and our people cannot afford it as well.”
The president also said the ANC supports the revisiting of decommissioning of coal-fired power stations schedule as the country struggles to balance its energy security and climate commitments.
He said this was not a new approach as a number of other countries have had to do so when they were faced with a variety of crises in their energy generation sectors.
“The NEC supports the approach that as we prioritise ending load-shedding, we will need to revisit our decommissioning schedule to balance energy security and our climate commitments,” he said.
The NEC noted that as government worked on achieving energy security for the country, it was doing so in the context of the country’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emission which harmed the planet and also affected the health of many people.
He said SA was committed to its emission reduction target to prevent the effects of climate change.
“We must also protect jobs in sectors of our economy which have to decarbonise to remain globally competitive and viable.”
“However, the manner in which these commitments are implemented must not compromise our national interest such as energy security or the immediate priority of reducing load-shedding,”said Ramaphosa.
He said the NEC welcomed the significant steps taken by government to implement the energy action plan, with an immediate focus to improve the performance of power stations, the provision of emergency generation capacity and ensuring uninterrupted power supply to strategic installations and infrastructure.
The NEC noted that Eskom was undertaking necessary maintenance now to ensure that planned outages could be limited, particularly during winter when demand was expected to increase.
He then called on South Africans to contribute to the reduction of load-shedding by switching off their geysers during the day and in the evening, saying this will result in Eskom being able to have added capacity for energy generation.
Watch Live in the video below:
Video Courtesy of ANC.