Mbeki denies ANC rift over Zuma

JOHANNESBURG – South African President Thabo Mbeki has strongly denied there was a rift in his ruling African National Congress (ANC) and blamed the media for fuelling debate on the future of his former deputy Jacob Zuma.

Mbeki, who has in recent days been criticised by key political allies including the powerful union movement and the Communist Party, said the ANC remained united and there was no power struggle. “The speculative prediction that the ANC may not ‘survive intact’, is nothing more than an expression of the vain wishes of its inventors,” Mbeki said in his weekly online letter to ANC members.The ANC, which under Nelson Mandela led South Africa from apartheid to democracy in 1994, has been propelled into choppy waters over the past year following Mbeki’s decision to sack the popular Zuma amid a corruption scandal.Mbeki’s critics saw the move as a bid to block Zuma from succeeding to the national presidency in 2009.Zuma remains deputy president of the ANC and is a favourite of the ruling party’s leftist partners.Mbeki said the “very strange public controversy” over Zuma was being fanned by the media and represented a distraction from the ANC’s main focus of building South Africa’s new democracy.”There are some in our country who seem to have come to fundamentally wrong conclusions about what constitutes the most important challenges facing our movement,” he said.”These people have convinced themselves that these challenges centre on such issues as the political future of our Deputy President, Jacob Zuma, and the seemingly related matters of who, in future, will constitute the leadership of the ANC and the Government of the Republic.”Zuma supporters have voiced unhappiness over Mbeki’s emphasis on market-oriented economic policies, while the powerful Cosatu labour federation last week accused him of permitting South Africa to “drift toward dictatorship” through over-centralisation of power in the presidency.Mbeki said he and Zuma both rejected any attempts to drive a wedge between them and would reinforce the party’s tradition of collective leadership.ANC delegates will choose the leader of the party at its five-yearly congress in December 2007 and that person is expected to take over from Mbeki as president of the country.- Nampa-Reuters”The speculative prediction that the ANC may not ‘survive intact’, is nothing more than an expression of the vain wishes of its inventors,” Mbeki said in his weekly online letter to ANC members.The ANC, which under Nelson Mandela led South Africa from apartheid to democracy in 1994, has been propelled into choppy waters over the past year following Mbeki’s decision to sack the popular Zuma amid a corruption scandal.Mbeki’s critics saw the move as a bid to block Zuma from succeeding to the national presidency in 2009.Zuma remains deputy president of the ANC and is a favourite of the ruling party’s leftist partners.Mbeki said the “very strange public controversy” over Zuma was being fanned by the media and represented a distraction from the ANC’s main focus of building South Africa’s new democracy.”There are some in our country who seem to have come to fundamentally wrong conclusions about what constitutes the most important challenges facing our movement,” he said.”These people have convinced themselves that these challenges centre on such issues as the political future of our Deputy President, Jacob Zuma, and the seemingly related matters of who, in future, will constitute the leadership of the ANC and the Government of the Republic.”Zuma supporters have voiced unhappiness over Mbeki’s emphasis on market-oriented economic policies, while the powerful Cosatu labour federation last week accused him of permitting South Africa to “drift toward dictatorship” through over-centralisation of power in the presidency.Mbeki said he and Zuma both rejected any attempts to drive a wedge between them and would reinforce the party’s tradition of collective leadership.ANC delegates will choose the leader of the party at its five-yearly congress in December 2007 and that person is expected to take over from Mbeki as president of the country.- Nampa-Reuters