'Voters must elect premiers'

2008-07-15 10:33

Cape Town - South Africa is being held captive by the politics of factionalism in the ANC, and the time has come for the president and premiers to be directly elected by voters, United Democratic Movement leader Bantu Holomisa said on Tuesday.

"Now that the tripartite alliance has finished feeding on the carcass of the National Party, they are turning inwards to ferret out the so-called 'undesirables', such as premiers, and no doubt followed later on by MECs and then the bureaucrats," he said.

All of this would further undermine service delivery.

"We should expect that the (ANC President Jacob) Zuma faction will move at maximum speed to remove those people that they perceive as stumbling blocks in their way.

Preparing for elections

"Their most immediate motivation is to have access to state resources in preparation for the elections," Holomisa said.

The ANC had for years now used government resources like military helicopters to fly to multiple rallies on a single day, "government" functions that were actually ANC campaign masquerades, and had numerous other ways of exploiting their control of government to promote the ANC.

Now they knew that to campaign for Zuma they would need to remove the people appointed by President Thabo Mbeki to key positions in government, who knew they were on their way out and would not be keen to assist their successors.

"These state powers and resources they so desperately strive for, has got nothing to do with a desire to improve service delivery, but is a continuation of the promotion of the interests of a small elite," he said.

"Nor have they any credentials to lecture us on corruption and crime, since their track records speak for themselves.

"The question is for how long is South Africa going to tolerate this faulty system, where the whole nation is held captive by the politics of factionalism?"

ANC a 'big rudderless ship'

This was not the ANC that the people used to know, and which many supported to topple the apartheid regime.

The last remnants of the ANC of Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela were left in Polokwane.

The current situation looked like the ANC was a big rudderless ship being led around by the nose by a small tugboat in the form of the SA Communist Party.

The time had arrived for the president and premiers to be separately elected by the people. It would give the voters a direct say in who led them.

Such an approach would even allow strong leaders within the ANC threatened with labels such as "counter-revolutionary" whenever they dared raise their voices, to stand as candidates and be accountable to the voters, not just to a small faction in the ruling party, Holomisa said.

- SAPA