the arena of progressive thought

www.ziwaphi.com

ZIWAPHI • VOL 4 NO 6 • 26 MARCH - 8 APRIL 2010

NELSPRUIT

Ehlanzeni Regional Secretary of the African National Congress, Pat Ngomane must be thinking that the people of Mpumalanga are fools, or at least those who were listening to him on radio on Wednesday, following his announcement that the organisation’s Regional General Council (RGC) took a resolution to “recall” Mbombela Mayor, Lassy Chiwayo.

The conduct of Ngomane reminds me of some stupid apartheid police who petrol-bombed our house, and a few minutes later they returned in marked police vehicles to “investigate” what could have caused the fire.

They were so stupid because they had forgotten that they had never before raided my home using marked police vehicles. The used to drive in white Ford Siearas and Nissan Skylines without number plates.

“We will investigate and bring whoever was responsible to book,” they told my mother at the time. More than 25 years later, she is still waiting for the outcome of their “investigation”.

Ngomane is doing the same thing. He claims that last weekend’s RGC took a decision to recall Chiwayo, but everyone knows that this decision was taken long ago by Ehlanzeni’s Regional Executive Committee (REC), and that many people in the Provincial Executive Committee of the ANC are also behind that decision. This was after Chiwayo had refused to appoint the wife of a member of the REC into the Mayoral Committee.

Even the Provincial Chairperson of the ANC and current Premier of Mpumalanga, David “DD” Mabuza acknowledged early last year that there were comrades in the REC who wanted to fire Chiwayo and other councillors.

Just like the stupid apartheid police, Ngomane wants everyone to believe that the PEC will take an objective decision on Chiwayo. Who is he trying to fool? Most of the current PEC members contested and lobbied against Chiwayo during the 2008 Provincial Conference of the ANC, so how can they take a decision that is opposed to the “RGC” decision, which we now know that it was there more than a year before the RGC was even contemplated?

Mabuza has an opportunity to demonstrate that he is above factional politics and dismiss the REC proposal which is camouflaged as RGC proposal.

What was interesting during the radio interview, was the detail with which Ngomane presented the credentials of the organisation to the whole province, if not the whole country, where the radio is transmitted. You’d swear that you were listening to a Secretariat Report or a credentials report during a closed session of the Conference of the ANC, but Ngomane disclosed these to the whole country. How things have changed?

In the ANC that we know, you’d be subjected to disciplinary processes for disclosing such confidential information to the public, let alone the media.

It’s such a difficult thing to tell a leader of the organisation, who is supposed to be the custodian of the policies, principles and practices of the organisation, that he is out of order, because he is the one who should be calling others to order.

If the ANC PEC is what it is supposed to be, it will begin by investigating if Ngomane did not transgress the principles of the organisation, before investigating the matter of Chiwayo’s alleged transgressions.

I had expected that Ngomane would use the opportunity on radio to tell us and whoever was listening about the outcome of the conference and the vision of the REC.

Regrettably, he spent the entire free advertisement of 1 hour and 30 minutes on bashing Chiwayo. You’d swear that he was campaigning for the 2008 provincial conference through negative canvassing of support.

His argument that he was asked to participate in the programme is a lame excuse. The radio did not ask him to  attack Chiwayo in public?

He should have refused to participate in the programme unless he was going to discuss politics, because the ANC is a political organisation, it is not an organisation about the removal or deployment of individuals, character assassination or hanging a dirty linen in the public.

During the entire programme, there was not even a single political statement that Ngomane made. This was even observed by a caller, who asked, why do you bring these matters to the public domain instead of dealing with them organizationally.

The caller was so brutal to the extent that he said, “COPE and DA are celebrating at our stupidity. Pat you are killing us, where are you taking this organisation?”

Even after such a sober intervention from an ordinary listener, Ngomane’s response failed to provide a political and theoretical perspective of the current developments. It came as no surprise when listeners started accusing him of waging a personal vendetta than pursuing a political cause, because there was nothing political that he said.

I have always regarded Chiwayo as one of the remaining few highly trained and advanced revolutionaries of our time, who is still in the structures of the ANC. His outburst, however, did very little to convince me that my assumptions were correct.

Even Thabo Mbeki reacted more wiser than Chiwayo, when he was recalled, by accepting and moving out quietly, even in the face of the worst kind of humiliation. Not that Chiwayo was not humiliated by this action.

The only correct thing that Chiwayo did on the day, was to stay away from the radio talk show.

But as an advanced revolutionary, he should have visited his tools of analysis and applied these to analyse the current situation. He has, however, allowed his anger to bring him to the same level as that of his detractors.

Jimmy Mohlala was killed because he had emphasized dialectics at the expense of materialism, and Chiwayo is doing the same mistake. I am also mindful that I may in turn be accused of emphasizing materialism at the expense of dialectics, but I am convinced that I have adequately analysed the balance of forces in the region in particular, and my conclusion is that Mpumalanga province or even the country, cannot afford another death, not of the calibre of Chiwayo.

Ngomane alleges that Chiwayo only listens to the PEC and NEC.

If what Ngomane presented on Wednesday is what Chiwayo was supposed to listen to, then I am not surprised, because there is no way that one can spend 180 minutes and not utter a single political statement. Who would listen to strings and strings of statements that lack politics? The ANC is not a social organisation, but it is an organisation that is guided by a particular ideology and revolutionary theory.

Chiwayo has clearly outgrown the province, and one caller even said that Chiwayo does not have a branch. He obviously knows a lot about Chiwayo, even though he had introduced himself as an ordinary citizen, but he seems to know something about the ANC membership system. How convenient? But this statement shows that Chiwayo needs to be deployed at a very senior level than to die like Jimmy Mohlala trying to clean up a corrupt institution.

It is an open secret that in Mpumalanga, and Ehlanzeni in particular, the balance of forces is not in favour of people like Chiwayo, or any other progressive minded and highly political members of the organisation.

In Nkomazi, for example, it is a crime if you develop yourself politically, if you do succeed, they confer a label on you – COPE! Some of those who confer such labels were not even born when their “victims” joined the ANC.

That, however, should not suggest that we should sit back and suspend our political work. We should continue until we have convinced every citizen that our struggle was never about the replacement of greedy white capitalists with greedy black capitalists who accumulate wealth at the expense of the poor people.

Amandla

By Mzala

Mbombela Executive Mayor, Lassy Chiwayo, addressing a media conference