Former president Jacob Zuma will be nowhere near the inaugural National Dialogue, and that, according to the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK Party), is how it was meant to be.
Speaking to Sunday World on Thursday, Nhlamulo Ndhlela, the national spokesperson for the MK Party, stated that the event organisers were aware that Zuma would never attend what the party perceives as a politically compromised gathering.
“Not in a million years,” Ndhlela said when asked whether Zuma had been invited, despite his status as a former head of state and leader of a party that secured more than 15% of the national vote in the 2024 general elections.
“They know better than to invite us,” Ndhlela said.
The MK Party has publicly positioned itself as one of the dialogue’s fiercest critics. Ndhlela explained that the party’s uncompromising stance had been clear from the moment the Presidency announced its plans.
“With the status that we took with our initial statement and the follow-up statement, they already knew that we can’t participate.”
For the MK Party, the so-called dialogue is a stage-managed process, more spectacle than substance.
“The dialogue was in fact a monologue,” Ndhlela said, accusing the Presidency of orchestrating an event designed to flatter President Cyril Ramaphosa rather than to engage ordinary South Africans.
Platform for the elites
According to Ndhlela, Zuma’s party draws its support from “a sizable number of voters … that cannot be ignored” — citizens who, in his view, see through what he calls a self-serving exercise.
“We released a statement on our stance on the ‘National Monologue’, and we stated that it’s nothing else, from where we are sitting, than a platform for the elites and to stroke Ramaphosa’s ego. We are not going to fall for that.”
The MK Party’s rejection comes as the Presidency finalises preparations for the dialogue’s convention from August 15–17 at the Gallagher Convention Centre in Midrand, Gauteng.
Initial figures predicted that 1 000 seats would be allocated, with 755 delegates already confirmed from more than 30 sectors and over 200 organisations — a cross-section that includes political parties, business, labour, civil society, and grassroots movements.
The first convention will set the agenda and form a steering committee to guide local and provincial dialogues over the next year, culminating in a second national convention in 2026.
But for the MK Party, the process is less about building consensus and more about reclaiming political ground lost to newer forces like Zuma’s party.
“It’s nothing but a platform for politicking and stunting. They are trying to cover lost ground,” he said.
“If you look, this so-called dialogue doesn’t have the people who form the grassroots of our society: the jobless people, the person who is ill or can’t get an education qualification due to poverty.”
SA’s vulnerable excluded
He warned that a true national conversation cannot exclude the country’s most vulnerable while elevating its most connected.
“When you are having a national dialogue, you can’t expect Ramaphosa’s friends and former business partners to represent the entire country. They are talking dislodged from reality.”
The MK Party’s boycott adds to a growing list of withdrawals from the process, joining the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, Steve Biko Foundation, Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, AfriForum, and the Solidarity Movement.
Each has voiced its version of the same grievance: that the dialogue is too rushed, too controlled, and too far removed from the South Africans it claims to serve.
With the political temperature rising and the list of absentees growing, the question now is whether the National Dialogue can still claim to speak for the nation, or whether, as the MK Party warns, it will go down as an elite gathering talking to itself.
