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Business Day, 23 June 2005
=ANC gets into gear for major indaba=


 * Karima Brown and Vukani Mde**

THE African National Congress (ANC) is keen to project an image of business as usual as the party gears up for next week’s national general council meeting in Pretoria. The ruling party’s deputy secretary-general Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele told a press briefing in Johannesburg yesterday that discussions would focus on key policy matters such as economic development issues and the reorganisation of the ANC.

“The (meeting) will not focus on leadership issues,” said Mthembi-Mahanyele.

Following former deputy president Jacob Zuma’s sacking from the cabinet, it is not yet clear whether he will attend the council meeting. Zuma has been stripped of all his ANC duties.

Mthembi-Mahanyele dismissed suggestions that the council meeting would be used as a rallying point for Zuma supporters.

ANC spokesman Smuts Ngonyama said senior national executive committee members had been deployed throughout the country to explain the issues surrounding Zuma ahead of the council meeting.

Ngonyama said other senior party members were also facing legal processes, but the meeting would not be a forum to discuss them.

“The ANC has Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Tony Yengeni, who are both senior members involved in legal processes, and we must respect those processes and the outcomes thereof,” he said.

The ANC yesterday released its discussion document on organisational design, aimed at restructuring ANC branches that have been in disarray.

Many do not hold regular meetings and are unable to respond on key political issues.

Mthembi-Mahanyele said the ANC had been looking at such a reorganisation ever since 1994.

“The political scenario has obviously changed,” she said. “We are operating under a wider agenda and there are new challenges.”

Branches would have to be restructured to align them with the “reality” of the ANC as a party in government, she said.

The redesign is the latest attempt to modernise the ANC and transform it from a liberation movement into a modern mass-based political party. The gap between party activists and ANC government officials has often led to conflict.

Meanwhile, some of the country’s leading analysts and academics have taken up the challenge laid down by the ANC when it launched its discussion documents earlier this month.

The Johannesburg-based Centre for Policy Studies yesterday published Trajectories for South Africa, a series of essays examining the discussion documents. Most were united in rejecting the party’s proposals on transforming the labour market and growing the economy.

One document, Development and Underdevelopment, deals with ANC proposals to relax laws protecting certain categories of workers, such as young job seekers, and lessen regulation for small enterprises and businesses in special industrial development zones.

In the introduction, the centre’s Omano Edigheji, the publication’s editor, argues that some of the ANC’s proposals will entrench the legacy of apartheid.

Edigheji writes: “The document seems to assume that there is a positive relationship between compromised workers’ rights and poverty reduction, as well as lowered workers rights and enhanced human dignity. Are workers’ rights not human rights?”


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A59789