By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Former president Thabo Mbeki says the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has a right to organise a protest on issues that are affecting the country.
However, he has made an appeal that any protest must be in line with the laws of the country.
Mbeki was speaking on the sidelines of an event organised by the Thabo Mbeki International School of Governance.
“I think the EFF and everybody who’s joined are perfectly entitled to demonstrate and so on, but I think a point has been made that we should avoid all violence and things like that. I watched a little bit when Julius talked about the demonstration and himself made this commitment that they don’t want violence and if there’s any violence, it would have been provoked by somebody else.
I think that common commitment by organisers and the rest of the country is correct, by all means I think people should demonstrate if they want to demonstrate on whatever the issue, but let’s avoid this kind of unnecessary conflict, the country doesn’t need it.”
ANC Renewal
Mbeki urged the ANC to speed up its process of renewal so that it would clean up its membership and get rid of corrupt individuals in the party.
He said that 20 years later, former ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe had said the same thing when he delivered his diagnostic report at the Nasrec conference in 2017.
He said the ANC needed quality membership and this was part of the renewal process.
Mbeki said the ANC had over one million members and it did not need all those members.
It was better to have good quality members who would serve the party with honesty, integrity and values as espoused in its documents.
The ANC would regain the trust of communities if it went back with a clean image by having quality membership.
Over the years the ANC had been getting people who had ulterior motives and were involved in corruption and accessing resources, Mbeki said.
“If you look at ANC documents from 1997 to 2017 they all say the same thing, which is that the quality of membership of the ANC is deteriorating. Therefore, you are accumulating within the ranks of the ANC people who are bound to do wrong things. They join the ANC in order to steal and they will steal. You can speak a million times about ending corruption. They won’t end corruption, they will continue to be corrupt,” said Mbeki.
“The ANC says it has got a membership of a million plus. Why it needs so many members I don’t know because it does not. Hence, this slogan we borrowed from Lenin, when Lenin talks about something different when the Soviet Union was born he used the phrase ‘better fewer but better’. Let us have fewer than a million, but better people who are true members of the ANC. That would have a very serious impact on this matter of corruption, in combating corruption, to deal with these people within the ranks of the ANC who are in the ANC for wrong reasons. I am saying better fewer but better,” said Mbeki.
Phala Phala
Mbeki has also weighed in on the preliminary report by acting Public Protector Kholeka Gcaleka, saying it was not a final report and should be treated in that way.
He said as far as he understood this was a preliminary report that has been sent to parties that had complained about the matter.
It was not meant for public release, but had been leaked.
The acting public protector has not made a final determination on the issue of Phala Phala pending the inputs of parties like the DA and ATM which had lodged a complaint.
“It’s only after that that the public protector will produce a final report. The public protector has made no determination. The report that the public protector has cleared Ramaphosa is incorrect.
“They are in the process of working on the matter and have said that when they receive those inputs from others then they will prepare a final report. That is as I understand the matter,” Mbeki added.
Meanwhile Professor Barney Pityana said on Thursday, South Africa is a nation in despair and its citizens are a broken society.
“We are a nation in despair; it seems progressive, almost psychotic. South Africans are almost depressed about their condition at the moment.
He added, that listening to Ramaphosa…. there is no sense of urgency, no sense of emergency, no sense of crisis, and no rallying call to say to South Africans to wake up, to do something extraordinary to get us out of this mess that we are in. We need South Africans at this crucial moment to come together.
“We need a government to govern and to govern in the interest of our people, but the government is a disappearing state,” he said.