The ANC in the Western Cape won’t announce its premier candidate to oppose Helen Zille for the 2014 election any time soon.
|||Cape Town - The ANC in the Western Cape will not announce its premier candidate to oppose the DA’s Helen Zille for next year’s election any time soon.
Instead, the party will be focusing on “unity” and “connecting with communities”.
This was the word yesterday from provincial ANC leader Marius Fransman, who is also Deputy Minister of International Relations and Co-operation - a day after Zille confirmed she was “available” to serve a second five-year term as premier.
Contacted on Tuesday, Fransman said: “Our focus will not be, and must not be, on a premier candidate. You will recall that during the period when we as a party were most divided over leadership, that was when the DA became far stronger.”
That was between 2007-2009, when former premier Ebrahim Rasool was sacked, Lynne Brown took over, and the war between two factions loosely affiliated to Rasool and Mcebisi Skwatsha still raged.
“The more divided we are, the stronger the DA will get. We cannot allow that to happen again,” Fransman told the Cape Argus.
Instead, the ANC’s focus would be on retaining its new-found unity and its strategic plan titled “The People’s Path to Power”, and based on five priorities: organisational renewal, re-connecting with communities and civil society, offering alternative governance, ensuring economic transformation and strengthening local governance.
Earlier this year Fransman said his leadership team was “working as a united front to win back this province in 2014”.
Asked on Tuesday whether there was a deliberate strategy for senior national ANC leaders to campaign in the Western Cape - such as Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa recently - Fransman said it was simply part of “reconnecting with communities”, as the ANC plan dictated.
He denied outright any link with the “poo wars”, saying that the party had rejected the faeces-flinging “with contempt”, and that the campaign had “no dignity”.
But despite Fransman’s firm dismissal of any debate around a premier candidate, other ANC sources agreed that there was already keen speculation “at different levels, and in different structures” as to who the preferred candidates would be.
Cape Argus
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