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A meeting by the ANC’S top brass – its national executive committee (NEC) which was due to meet on Tuesday has been postponed to Thursday.
According to a senior ANC leader, this comes amid a fallout within the group.
“There’s a lot of tension currently. Not only because of our loss to the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK) which is humiliating, but because of four snakes within the NEC, whom we suspect were working with the MK all along,” the leader told IOL — names of the suspected four were given to IOL.
The meeting is the first since the election results were announced on Saturday — despite over 500 objections from the majority of parties which contested.
The MK party is calling for a rerun of the elections, insisting they would have crossed the 50% mark in KZN had it not been for what it calls “IEC vote rigging”.
The party emerged the third largest in the country, and biggest in KZN where they secured 45.35% of the votes, followed by the IFP at 18% and the ANC 16.9%. This represented a whopping drop of 37.2% for the ANC leading the party to publicly declare its humiliating defeat to MK, and conceding that former president Jacob Zuma who heads the party was a “force to be reckoned with”.
With coalition talks hot on the table, parties are running a race to clinch their preferred governing partners and secure ministerial portfolios. The DA has already showed its cards, saying it would be willing to work with the ANC or the IFP to keep MK at bay.
But the ANC source has dismissed DA statements that they are in coalition talks, adding there’s little appetite for a coalition with the DA.
“There are no talks with the DA. Our policies don’t align. There is also concern around our international position with Palestine and our role at the International Court of Justice,” the source said.
“If we go into a coalition with the DA that will be a smack in the face internationally for us. The IFP on the other hand has had a history of battles with the ANC which is very painful,” said the source.
“And while some of our guys tried to argue that’s only in KZN, the response was we didn’t do anything at national-level to stop it. So far we are leaning at partnering with the EFF. They want the finance portfolio… We may offer them deputy but its all under discussion, it’s early days,” the source said.