ANC Deputy Secretary General Jessie Duarte has launched a scathing attack on the party’s Secretary General Ace Magashule, accusing him of deliberately leaking the video of a meeting she and five other national officials had with former president Jacob Zuma.
In the video, Duarte is heard saying she supported Zuma’s stance on the Constitutional Court issue.
Duarte told the meeting of national officials that she personally doesn’t support views that Zuma should appear before Zondo.
“Going to the commission under Zondo, personally I believe that is absolutely not a good thing for Comrade Zuma to do given the personal, historical and mechanisms that exist between them,” Duarte said.
“The unfortunate way in which judge Zondo presented himself after he presided as Comrade Zuma over his own case regarding bias and also made statements about ‘he’s not my friend’, I think it doesn’t auger well for a judge to go into that granular kind of detail.”
Duarte said these were some of the “machinations” the commission was using to target certain individuals who gave evidence.
“The [former] president in his opening remarks about the mechanisations at the commission, that is because we ourselves have looked at those mechanisations, for example the fact that it is turned into a court, it’s no longer a commission. They have an almost prosecutorial attitude towards people who come to give evidence,” Duarte said.
“From my side, one of the things that shows there’s a problem is that a good friend of mine, [Vincent] Smith who was in parliament, discusses with us whether he goes to the commission or not and we say you must go. He goes there and a week later he is slapped with a criminal court case.
In a hard-hitting interview with Eyewitness News on Thursday, Duarte called on Magashule to do better by the governing party and instruct his supporters to stop the campaign to destroy the ANC.
Duarte told EWN that the leak was meant to create an impression that she was of low moral integrity claiming that the clip was manipulated to suit a particular narrative.
- Inside Politics