ANC must prove that 'councillors' who joined party were our members - KZN DA

13 June 2016

Durban – The DA in KwaZulu-Natal has questioned statements made by the ANC during its manifesto launch in Pietermaritzburg on Sunday.

The ANC on Sunday announced that several DA councillors, from the Msunduzi and Umkhanyakude District Municipality, had resigned and joined the ANC, but DA provincial leader Zwakele Mncwango has challenged the ANC to make the names of those councillors public to prove that they had indeed been members of the DA.

News24 sent Mncwango pictures of the alleged councillors which were paraded on stage in front of President Jacob Zuma and more than 40 000 people.

"From the pictures, I can tell you now that there is no Msunduzi or Umkhanyakude councillors who resigned and joined the ANC. I do, however, recognise one person and that is councillor Zama Sibisi from Ladysmith in Uthukela, the rest were not our councillors."

ANC provincial chairperson Sihle Zikalala told the gathering on Sunday that the councillors had voluntarily joined the ANC because they were tired of the DA.

He said the councillors did not join the party because they wanted to be councillors. "They did not join to be councillors, they joined the party," said Zikalala.

He also said: "The DA can keep its Penny Sparrow and other oppressors. We have processed their memberships. We want to say that we will not burn the DA T-shirts, we will take the T-shirts back with respect. We do not agree with intolerance. We will take them back nicely to the DA and they can reuse them."

Mncwango explained that the DA had one PR councillor in the Umkhanyakude District and that he had not resigned. The councillor, Richard Mkhwanazi, confirmed to News24 that he was still a councillor.

Mncwango said: "Who are those people? If the ANC can provide us with a list of the people’s names and which wards they belong to, we will confirm that those people they paraded were our members."

Mncwango said Sibisi was undergoing a performance review ahead of the elections and that the party had found that he had been red-flagged, which meant that he had underperformed.

"He was not going to come back as a councilor, anyway. He appealed the decision and the committee threw the case out. We have no grudges against him."

Mncwango said the DA would not respond to the statements about Penny Sparrow - who was recently ordered to pay R150 000 to the Olive and Adelaide Tambo Foundation for making racist remarks - as she had been ejected from the party.

ANC provincial spokesperson Mdumiseni Ntuli and Mhlaba Memela were not immediately available for comment.

This article first appeared on News24, see here.