Cape Town — South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) moved closer to its most significant split in half a century on Wednesday, when the country's former defence minister, Mosiuoa Lekota, announced consultations which he predicted would lead to the formation of a new party.
Lekota, who was party chairman until he was voted out of office last December, announced in a news conference broadcast live from Johannesburg that a group of ANC members who were dissatisfied with the current party leadership would be holding consultations in the next two to four weeks on calling a national convention "on how to defend democracy in this country."
He did not treat a split as inevitable but acknowledged, "This is probably the parting of the ways, it probably is. We hope that sense may still prevail... if not, there is no going back." Asked later whether the members he represented were in "marriage counselling" with the party, or headed for divorce, he added: "It seems that we are serving today divorce papers."
Lekota resigned as defence minister two weeks ago when the ANC asked former President Thabo Mbeki to step down. Lekota declined on Wednesday to be drawn on whether Mbeki was playing any role in the prospective split, but the ANC has in recent days said that it planned to involve Mbeki in electioneering for the 2009 parliamentary polls. Mbeki's roots in the party go back further than Lekota's - his father was one of the ANC leaders jailed with Nelson Mandela for life in 1964.
Lekota is a blunt-spoken activist who began to express his unhappiness at the nature of the revolution within the ANC which brought Jacob Zuma to power in the months leading up to, and then following last December's ANC national conference.
On Wednesday Lekota returned to the attack on the same issues, accusing the new ANC leadership under Zuma of "veering away from the course that attracted [many of] us to the ranks of its membership."
He condemned vigorously the "tribalism" associated with Zuma supporters who wore T-shirts carrying Zuma's image and reading "100% Zuluboy." In an apparent reference to Zuma's theme song, "Mshini wam" ("Bring me my machine gun"), he deplored the singing at party rallies of "strange songs... which advocate violence, at a time... when we are supposed to advocate peace and development."
He accused ANC leaders of deviating from the movement's 1955 Freedom Charter, which promised equality before the law, by calling for a "political solution" to end the trial of Zuma on corruption charges. He also critcised "mobs" on the streets who engaged in "a tirade of attacks on the courts and the judges....
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"We must stand up to oppose this deviation, this arrogance," he said.
The only individual Lekota named was Julius Malema, the youth leader who has said he is prepared to kill to ensure Zuma's accession to the presidency of South Africa next year. "Let it be the people of South Africa who choose whether they want to go with the Malemas of this world, or whether they want to go with sober men and women" committed to the Freedom Charter, Lekota said.
The last major breakaway from the ANC was that of the Pan-Africanist Congress in 1958, which took exception to the role played by white communists in the alliance of movements of which the ANC was part.
Lekota, 60, cut his teeth in the black consciousness movement made famous internationally by activist Steve Biko, who was killed by police in detention in 1977. Lekota was jailed for six years on Robben Island at the end of the apartheid's government's principal show trial of black consciousness leaders in 1976.
Like many black consciousness adherents, he transferred his allegiance under the influence of ANC members in prison, and he went on to become a leader of the United Democratic Front (UDF) - which included many ANC supporters - as an above-ground anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. The UDF was dissolved after the ANC was unbanned in 1990s and most of its leaders moved into ANC positions.
