ANC To Re-educate Members With Charm Offensive

Farrel — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 07:21:00 -0500

The ANC is reportedly about to embark on a ‘charm offensive’ program in order to regain goodwill from members and officials who are not happy with the recent infighting between the members of the tripartite alliance. Here is how the program is described:

The national executive committee (NEC) has charged ANC provincial leaders with convening “compulsory political schools” that will be held monthly for branch executives and quarterly for members of the provincial legislatures, provincial ministers and members of the ANC provincial executive committees. National ANC leaders will be deployed to the provinces to lead the debates.

“We want to re-educate members about the principles, tradition and ethos of the ANC to stop them from following individuals,” said Supra Mahumapelo, the North West ANC secretary. “When leaders go off the track, we must speak to the principle, not the individual.”

Compulsory political schools? Re-educate members? That sounds less like a charm offensive and more like the current ANC leadership doing some squashing of dissent in the ranks and weeding out of undesirables from position of power. When you consider this response the SACP received from the ANC after the SACP published their State Power from ANC high up and Mbeki ally Joel Netshitenzhe:

The [SACP] document posits an outdated proposition that South Africa could have had or should have a ‘socialist orientated’ or ‘non-capitalist’ path to socialism … this error is a consequence of a subjectivism that informs most of the treatise: great revolutionary things could have happened had it not been for the cadres who betrayed the revolution!

I wouldn’t be suprised if the ANC orients themselves even further away from the socialist bent of their (former?)tripartite allies.

Politics.za: ANC To Re-educate Members With Charm Offensive

ANC To Re-educate Members With Charm Offensive