Johannesburg – The deadly ANC nomination process and contestation in KwaZulu-Natal has led to some candidates nominated to stand as ward councillors to withdraw their candidature, Sunday World has established.
According to the SACP in the province, it had received six withdrawal letters of candidates who were no longer interested in standing as ward councillors in some areas.
A high number of these wards are in Umlazi and Ntuzuma townships.
“This is a clear indication that democracy has been thrown out of the window through these brutal killings.
“People are terrified at what is happening and they are opting to withdraw despite being favoured by their respective constituencies,” said SACP KwaZulu-Natal secretary Themba Mthembu.
Mthembu blamed the ongoing killings on the governing party’s top brass, saying they were downplaying what was happening in the province.
“The elephant is in the room. We had several meetings with the ruling party to raise our concerns about the flawed nomination processes. But our concerns were rubbished.
“This is not for the first time, even during the 2016 local government elections, some of the SACP members were killed leading up to the elections,” said Mthembu.
He added that the stance taken by the ANC that the Inanda killings (last week) were a “pure act of criminality” was insensitive to those who had lost their lives and a deliberate attempt to ignore the source of the killings, which were squarely political in nature.
In KwaZulu-Natal, the ANC and its tripartite alliance partner has always had frosty relations.
Leading up to the 2016 municipal elections, the cracks reached boiling point when some SACP members who were selected as councillors in Intshangwe area near Hammersdale township were ambushed and killed in community meetings.
The underlying cause of the killings was widely interpreted as a direct spillover of a fierce rivalry between current SACP chairperson James Nxumalo and former eThekwini mayor Zandile Gumede.
The pair had squared off for chair-personship in the 2015 eThekwini regional elective conference, which had to be reconvened three times after some ANC branches, who had vouched for Gumede, refused to accept Nxumalo as the duly elected winner.
Gumede eventually won the last round of the conference courtesy of the SACP withdrawing its participation.
The victory ensured that Gumede became eThekwini metro mayor by virtue of her being regional chairperson of the governing party.
The SACP does not stand for elections, instead it fields its preferred candidates through the banner of the governing party, the alliance leader.
On allegations that the ANC was downplaying the political-linked killings, the party said it did not know what the SACP was talking about.
“I don’t know what they are talking about because nobody could have prepared and anticipated that people would be killed in Inanda,” said ANC KwaZulu-Natal spokesperson Nhlakanipho Ntombela.
“We have come out as the ANC to condemn the killings as barbaric acts and we are assisting the law-enforcement agencies to ensure that the perpetrators are brought to book.
“The ANC has also been proactive in ensuring that all complaints about nomination processes, which are alleged to have gone wrong, are being investigated.”
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