By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The African National Congress (ANC) Secretary General Fikile Mbalula confirmed the party will turn to the Supreme Court of Appeal to challenge a High Court order instructing it to hand over minutes of meetings from its deployment committee.
Mbalula said they cannot be told to disclose the information which is their exclusive property.
He was speaking during a briefing on the outcomes of the party’s national working committee meeting on Thursday.
“As of yesterday, 21 June 2023, petition the Supreme Court of Appeal. Our view is that the judge erred of law, and we are therefore confident that a higher court might come to a different conclusion on the matter,” he said.
“The ANC will use available legal avenues and recourse to the courts to preserve its information which is the property of the ANC to the exclusion of any other party.”
Last week the governing party lost a bid to appeal the February Johannesburg High Court outcome.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) believes the minutes will expose President Cyril Ramaphosa’s complicity in state capture and corruption.
“It is clear now that the ANC is in a desperate panic to hide the truth about cadre deployment so if the was truly nothing nefarious about that practice as the ANC likes to claim why is the party so desperate to keep it secret,” said DA Spokesperson on Public Administration Leon Schreiber.
The ANC deployment committee’s minutes, from 2018 to 2021, revealed how the party ran a parallel process to fill certain positions at several government departments, agencies and the boards of SOEs.
According to the minutes from a meeting held on 22 March 2019, the committee preselected the appointment of judges for vacant posts in the judiciary.
The Constitutional Court (ConCourt) at the time had two vacant positions, while the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) had one.
Ramaphosa defended the deployment policy during his testimony at the State Capture Commission, arguing the policy was an important part of implementing the ANC’s mandate.