Former President Thabo Mbeki says since 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) has been attracting the wrong people within its ranks.
As the ANC tries to work towards renewal in a bid to ‘self-correct’, Mbeki on Thursday warned that the renewal must be genuine and not for show, if not genuine then the party risks being punished by the masses when the elections come.
While delivering a keynote address at the memorial service of struggle stalwart Rita Alice Ndzanga, Mbeki said every ANC conference since democracy has attracted the wrong people.
“The leadership of the ANC Women’s League said we must never attack the ANC in public. She’s right. But I hope she didn’t mean we shouldn’t point out what’s wrong in society.”
“There’s something wrong with us. I’m not criticising the ANC, I’m criticising us. The population is saying you’re not behaving like the ANC we know, so something must change. Something must change in the way we behave as members of the ANC.
“Since 1994, if you look at all conferences of the ANC, up to 2017, all of them without exception and since we came into government, we have been attracting into our ranks wrong people,” he said.
He pointed to the ruling party’s declining electoral support in the 2021 local government elections which saw it get fewer than 50% of votes nationally.
“There is something very disturbing which has been happening over the last few years, that as we go to vote, the number of people in Soweto voting for the ANC keeps dropping. It keeps going down, including in the last elections.”
He concluded that the problem lay with members of the party and not the organisation itself.
Source: Sowetan Live, Daily Maverick, image from Twitter
