By Simon Nare
Former EFF MP Mbuyiseni Ndlozi has finally broken his silence over his banishment from his party, confirming that he was instructed to resign from Parliament.
He was also ordered not to attend the party’s elective conference in December last year.
Ndlozi said during an SABC television interview that he had resigned as an EFF member and was leaving party politics.
He revealed that his troubles started when former EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu jumped ship to join former president Jacob Zuma’s MK Party. He said he was suspended over allegations that he knew of Shivambu’s departure but did take the leadership into confidence.
He added that he was accused of planning to leave the party and follow Shivambu. The party’s intelligence report on whose basis he was suspended further accused him of being a double agent.
He said he was told to stay at home while the matter was being investigated and was promised that the findings would be made available to him after the conference.
He would also be given an opportunity to respond.
Ndlozi said he considered the allegations as dangerous and serious.
“I can say it categorically now that I never planned to join the MKP and I still don’t. I never worked with anybody in the MKP in relation to some conspiracy of my departure and I think that whatever information that they say they have, was largely based on lies.
“Secondly, I did know about the departure of Floyd Shivhambu. He did come to tell me about his consideration… The idea that I should run behind his back and inform other people and the leadership suggested that I was an informant, a wedge driver. I am none of those,” said Ndlozi.
He said that was Shivhambu’s matter and it was he who had communicate it to the leadership, which he did.
Ndlozi said he has not heard about the investigation’s findings and the attitude of the EFF leadership was clear that there was no interest.
He said he had personally let it go.
Ndlozi said he had hoped that after the elective conference, the party he gave his life to and the party he loved, would give him some kind of closure.
He said it was publicly known that the EFF has been in talks with Zuma for years to seek for his endorsement. He labelled it a tactic entanglement that led to the losses in the elections and being overtaken in KwaZulu-Natal and the National Assembly.
“We had already been entangled by the leadership itself and this entanglement in my view, which I think was a miscalculation tactic of entanglement, should be understood for what is responsible for what rocked us in relation to the departure of the then deputy president Floyd Shivhambu,” he said.
Ndlozi refused to blame EFF leader Julius Malema for his strained relationship with the party, saying this was a decision taken by the collective leadership and this was a political matter and not personal.
He said Shivhambu’s departure should not have planted a distrust within the party as Shivhambu had not joined a party on the right, but rather a party that should be considered to be on the picket lines.
Ndlozi revealed that he had handed in his resignation and he was considering civil society activism similar to AfriForum was advocating for the Afrikaner community.
“I have made my contribution. I think there are brilliant young men and women, old men and women as well in the space who will continue in the category as it were of party politics. I think I will contribute elsewhere in the remaining decades of my life,” he said.
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