GAUTENG ANC provincial chairperson David Makhura has strongly slammed delegates at the ANC Ekurhuleni Regional Conference for embarassing the governing party with their conduct, which included throwing of chairs, bricks and punch-ups between delegates.
The conference, currently underway at the Indaba hotel, north of Johannesburg, only started late on Saturday afternoon after almost two days of delays due to disagreement over eight disqualified branches.
So deep were the divisions at the elective conference that the Steering Committee led by Makhura and provincial Treasurer Parks Tau had to be called in to diffuse the situation.
“This [conference] is like a war zone. We must be ashamed,” said Makhura in reference to heavily armed private security at the eighth regional conference of Ekurhuleni n Fourways.
“I see arms. I see the sort of things happening that says this is not a conference of the ANC. We must be ashamed. The people carrying firearms, I saw the type of guns that I have only seen in conflict zones elsewhere, including in Ukraine … Some people were naked in protest, which is completely unnecessary in the ANC.”
“Those in leadership, it is also not acceptable to abuse the process to want to exclude those who may not be supporting you. It has been a complete shame what has characterised this conference,” Makhura said.
Mzwandile Masina, the current chair of the region and the former mayor of Ekurhuleni, is seeking a third term and is up against his former ally Doctor Xhakaza.
Masina has been called to step down as regional chairperson after the ANC in the region lost to a coalition of opposition parties in the 2021 local government elections.
Addressing delegates, Makhura said the scenes he had witnessed at the regional conference were “un-ANC”.
He said he was worried about how the governing party was being portrayed in public, saying that the problem was that instead of discussing issues affecting communities in Ekurhuleni, conference delegates were more concerned about who gets elected.
He said this was what was leading to the violence because those standing for positions believe there should be bloodshed if they are not elected.
“There’s no word called elective conference. Show it to me if you found and tell me how it made its way in there. The reason there’s no elective conference is because elections are not the most important or the only issue at conference,” Makhura said.
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