Pretoria - ANC members who are legal practitioners have vowed to represent their cash-strapped party for free in the upcoming application by aggrieved members challenging the elections of the North West leadership in the Constitutional Court.
This was revealed by Obed Bapela, ANC National Executive Committee member and party deployee in North West, when he delivered the opening address of the second leg of the provincial conference at the Rustenburg Civic Centre.
Bapela said the lawyers represented the ANC at the Mahikeng High Court on Thursday when five of its aggrieved members applied for an urgent interdict to stop the conference from continuing.
The aggrieved parties also wanted the high court to set aside the election of the incumbent provincial chairperson, Nono Maloyi, and his executive.
The court, however, ruled against the aggrieved members on the grounds that they had failed to prove urgency in their application.
Addressing delegates at the conference, which was delayed for more than five hours, Bapela said: “The same lawyers who represented us pro bono at the Mahikeng High Court have now offered to again represent the ANC in other court matters for free.
“They say they are sick and tired of seeing their organisation being endlessly dragged to court for various litigations against it.”
ANC national spokesperson Pule Mabe also confirmed that the party had been made aware of the application before the Concourt, saying they would be ready to defend it.
“We are going to defend it in the Constitutional Court. They lost in the high court after the court found that they did not meet the requirements of an urgent application. If the court had allowed us to argue the merits of the case, we would have emerged victorious,” Mabe said.
He also made an about-turn on the ANC’s stance that those who take the party to court must have their membership terminated, saying they had decided against taking such drastic action.
“We are going to engage those members about the processes of the ANC. They are not going to lose their ANC membership,” he said.
Mabe and Dakota Legoete, however, warned that if the five members did not continue their participation in the ongoing conference, they would cease to be members of the party.
In support of his claim, Legoete said that a similar decision was taken in 1955 against members who defied the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955.
“Those members were expelled by the then secretary-general Walter Sisulu in 1955. Defying a conference is a dismissible offence. Delegates are representatives of branches. They must carry out the mandates of their branches.
“Those who did not want to accept the Freedom Charter were dismissed from the party, and later formed the PAC. They disagreed with the clause that the land belongs to all who live in it, black and white,” Legoete said.
He made these unsubstantiated claims of dismissal despite the fact that founding PAC president Robert Sobukwe and others were still members of the ANC until November 1958 when they formally announced their breakaway from the party.
Unlike Legoete’s version, Sobukwe and his supporters had accused the ANC of allegedly abandoning its 1949 Programme of Action.
By Saturday night, however, the five members in the Concourt application were not at the plenary session, where delegates were making their nominations for the 30-member provincial executive committee.
Pretoria News