Ex-ANC bigwig now sings to Zille’s tune

EX- ANC Western Cape secretary Neville Delport has warned that more disgruntled members will follow in his footsteps and join the DA after recently being replaced by a reconfigured leadership. 

Delport said despite winning an elective conference, former Provincial Executive Committee (PEC) members were discarded and replaced by “leaders who lost a conference”.

“In the ANC after the reconfiguration that was announced two weeks ago, you would see a conference that we won... We were actually thrown out, replaced by leaders who lost a conference, and those leaders are particularly in the Metro.

“Now those leaders (of the reconfigured PEC) do not represent the will of our coloured communities, and that is where we are stuck. Then we made a decision as a collective, and as I’ve said, many (others) will follow, to make sure that we need to find a new political home, and that new political home is the Democratic Alliance,” Delport said.

He made the remarks during a DA press conference announcing a number of ANC members joining the party on Wednesday. They also include Daniel Baadjies, Jason Don and Paulus Strauss.  

DA Federal Council Chairperson, Helen Zille said: “This is a milestone moment, and it mirrors the swing in support by South African voters who continue to abandon the ANC to support the DA. This is an example of the realignment of politics in South Africa.

“ANC support is in decline across South Africa and in the Western Cape, it is in terminal decline. In contrast, DA support continues to grow and momentum is building behind the DA’s offer to reform South Africa’s economy, grow jobs for all and replace BEE.”

ANC national spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu  said Delport's "exit affirms the correctness and necessity of the ongoing reconfiguration process, which seeks to restore the ANC’s integrity, discipline, and ideological clarity".

"We have always been aware of his regressive and narrow ideological posture, which sought to divide our people on the basis of apartheid classification.

"His departure is a confirmation that those who hold these kinds of tendencies in the movement will not survive an ANC that is renewed."

She said Delport’s decision to join a "right-wing formation that is openly anti-transformation, anti-justice, and indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians exposes the moral and political bankruptcy of those who abandon the cause of equality".

"The ANC’s mission in the Western Cape is to unite all South Africans, black (Africans, Coloureds, Indians) and white; behind one vision of a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, and prosperous South Africa.

"We seek a province where the children of Bonteheuwel, Delft, Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, and Mitchells Plain can live with the same dignity, safety, and opportunity as those in Franschhoek, Stellenbosch, and Sandton," Bhengu said.

ANC Provincial Task Team spokesperson, Sifiso Mtsweni, said the DA has now turned to the ANC itself in order to try and save its dwindling popularity.

“It hopes that, in the same ANC it has consistently falsely accused of not having quality leaders, it would change its fortunes. It’s a pity that once again, its fishing rod has attracted defects and by-products from the rubble that the renewal process has chinned out.

“The renewal process was always going to separate opportunists and political adventurists from real revolutionaries who are driven purely by the desire to serve the interests of our people in the province,” Mtsweni said.

Political analyst and higher education consultant Professor Sipho Seepe said: “We should always accept that politicians are expedient, and they always act in their own interest, despite the notion of saying that they act in the interest of the organisation.

“The fact that you can have people who were long-standing members of the ANC joining the DA, underscores that the ANC is no longer seen as a vehicle for the betterment of the people, which these former members of the ANC represented,” Seepe said.

He said in the Western Cape, the DA is seen as a political choice because there is no alternative.

"The ANC’s notion of being a leader society is continuously eroded, and it is eroded at the time when Ramaphosa had claimed that the ANC is embarking on a renewal campaign,” he said.

Cape Times