President Cyril Ramaphosa is this evening expected to announce the outcomes of the Special National Executive Committee (NEC) on Thursday in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg. The parties’ top brass met at the Birchwood Hotel on the East Rand to discuss various options of possible coalition arrangement after the ANC failed to secure enough votes to constitute a government on its own.
Several parties including the DA, the EFF, the IFP and the PA were touted as possible coalition partners.
ANC President Ramaphosa to announce decisions from the coalition talks meeting: Mzwandile Mbenje
ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula says the Government of Unity would be different from the one formed in 1994.
“The devil is in the details and so, the technical team in terms of negotiating will receive a braid mandate. But here, we are expecting a sober discussion based on all the experiences of other countries in the world that have been in a situation like ours,” he said.
“Never had we envisaged at a national level that we would be talking about coalitions. So, proposals put here are not cast in stone. Members of the NEC here are not robots, they will allow themselves to be engaged.”
He also sketched the nature of their debates.
“We started with the officials meeting where we mapped the Strategic Framework to the ANC. That Strategic Framework was presented to the NWC and now today, the NWC will report to the NEC of the ANC, and what then is the way forward in relation to the talks about talks, and in relation to the consultation and engagement in the exploratory consultation with other political parties. And on the basis of the framework we have presented, the NEC will deliberate and take a decision,” he said.
But the meeting was not without any controversy.
A handful of ANC members led by Sethu Hasana, Kay Sexwale and Thuthukile Zuma, among others, staged a protest outside the venue against a possible ANC-DA coalition arrangement.
They say the DA is anti-transformation.
Meanwhile, Mbalula dismissed the protest as unfortunate and misplaced.
“The ANC has never said they are going into coalition with the DA. The question of the Strategic Framework is going to look into the outcome of the elections, as we all know that, it doesn’t favour the ANC. And in this instance, we have said we are talking to everyone who in terms of the leader board is clear that they have significant numbers. So the protest is unfortunate because this is time for sober minds,” he said.
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